Deuteronomy

Memory and Tithing

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 97-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 97

Dictation Name: RR187BA97

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Let us worship God. One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after. That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to enquire in his temple. Wait on the Lord, be of good courage and He shall strengthen Thy heart. Wait I say, on the Lord. Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we come into Thy presence rejoicing in Thy goodness, in Thy mercies which are new every morning. We acknowledge that indeed we are ever in need of Thee, make us mindful not only of our needs oh Lord but of Thy mercies and blessings. So that we may praise Thee as we ought. Strengthen us in Thy service, prosper our faith, heal us of our infirmities and make us strong for Thy kingdom. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 26:12- 15. Our subject: Memory and Tithing. Deuteronomy 26:12- 15.

“When thou hast made an end of tithing all the tithes of thine increase the third year, which is the year of tithing, and hast given it unto the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, that they may eat within thy gates, and be filled;

13 Then thou shalt say before the Lord thy God, I have brought away the hallowed things out of mine house, and also have given them unto the Levite, and unto the stranger, to the fatherless, and to the widow, according to all thy commandments which thou hast commanded me: I have not transgressed thy commandments, neither have I forgotten them.

14 I have not eaten thereof in my mourning, neither have I taken away ought thereof for any unclean use, nor given ought thereof for the dead: but I have hearkened to the voice of the Lord my God, and have done according to all that thou hast commanded me.

15 Look down from thy holy habitation, from heaven, and bless thy people Israel, and the land which thou hast given us, as thou swarest unto our fathers, a land that floweth with milk and honey.”

We have a very important text here, it is really the last statement of law in the Pentateuch. More that follows has to do with the covenant ratification and Moses’ last words and so on. But God through Moses speaks about this particular tithe, the poor tithe. Now in a recent issue of the Chalcedon Report I wrote on the forgotten John Calvin. I feel it was an extremely important, it’s on a subject that people don’t enjoy hearing about. What Calvin said constitutes a true church is the faithful preaching of the word and a ministry to the poor through the deacons. In Geneva Calvin took care of education through this tithing, the elderly and homeless, the poor and needy, the sick homeless children and much more. He stresses hospitality so much that no one ever went through Geneva and had to sleep in the open, Calvin invited them to their home. He felt very strongly about this, intensely, but of course you never hear this about Calvin. This is an important aspect of Christian faith. This is why, we, Chalcedon, are involved in several things. Most of you know about our orphan aid work in Romania, it was on 20/20 after all, six times or seven last year, but we’ve also tried to help out in other ways with help, medical, to those with disfiguration through birth defects or accidents, we have a farm in Guatemala to teach farming to those who’ve lost their land to the Communist guerrillas and to help them get their land back and much, much more. This we have to do and this is God’s last word to His people as far as the giving of the law is concerned.

There is also here an emphasis on memory. Most of the text’s we’ve had in the last few weeks have stressed memory, without memory we are sub-human. We’ve lost that which makes us identifiable, we don’t know who we are, we have no past. God says we are to remember the past, God’s mercies and herein this text it is tied to gratitude and the third tithe, the poor tithe. We are to remember what God has done for us and to show the same grace and charity to others. In our Lord’s words in Matthew 10:8:

“Freely you have received, freely give.”

The poor tithe is first a form of worship. The covenant man manifests his worship of God by tithing. The tithe, verse fourteen tells us, is the hallowed or sacred thing. The confession here required is a statement by the covenant man that he has not stolen by God by bringing anything less than is God’s due. The tithe is not man’s property although the money, produce or goods are in our hands. They are God’s property and therefore hallowed or sacred. To touch that part of our income is sacrilegious and a theft. Then second, the tithe is a symbolic sacrifice, we are sacrifice a portion of our income to God because His royal government requires it. Third, the worshipper’s profession of faith in obedience, in verses thirteen to fifteen, invokes God’s blessing for faithfulness and implicitly His curse for disobedience. Fourth, by recalling God’s covenant gift to the Promised Land the stress is again on memory and gratitude. Where memory and gratitude disappear God’s curse takes over. The poor tithe is a law that is closely tied to the two great commandments. In Matthew 22:34-40 we are told:

“ But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together.

35 Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying,

36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?

37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

38 This is the first and great commandment.

39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

The three tithes are linked to this. The first tithe is to the Lord and His work. Then on alternate years there were other tithes, the second tithe is that we might rejoice before the Lord, wehre we celebrate His goodness and we include in our celebration the Levites, the Lord’s servants, the widows and orphans, and the third, our concern today, is for charity. Our love of God and of our neighbor is thus demonstrated without forgetting us and our needs. Since this tithe is a form of worship before the Lord and a solemn confession before Him to declare falsely or to stand before Him with tithing is to invite retribution. The tithe is the hallowed or sacred thing. It is hallowed because it belongs to God, not to us. The confession disclaims three kinds of pollution from misuse of the tithe. First, the tithe cannot be consumed by a mourner who is ceremonially unclean because it cannot be associated with death. The tithe is to the Lord, the author of all life and its purpose is to further life, not death. Charity is a way of furthering life and protecting it so that no funeral service, however religious, can be connected with life and the tithe. Second, unclean uses of the tithe or any connecting of the tithe with death are forbidden because the tithe celebrates God’s work which is life giving. It blesses our rejoicing before the Lord and in charity it guards the lives of the poor, the weak and the helpless.

Third, in no way can the tithe be used for anything connected with death. In other words, all there statements given are really a way of saying the same thing. The tithe to the poor is to further life, it cannot be used even to help the burial of the poor. The tithe must further, rescue and protect life in the Lord the author of life. The tithe was thus for the relief of the poor. They are to rejoice with us and to eat to their full. In verse fifteen we have a petition for God’s blessing if we are faithful to His requirement here. This confession includes, in verse thirteen, a vow that one has been faithful and obedient to all God’s commandments. This does not mean perfect obedience but a thorough faithfulness wherein we seek with all our heart, mind and being to obey the Lord. There are two verses for sin in the bible, parenthetically, the one in the New Testament in particular, ‘hamartia’, missing the mark going in the right direction but we’ve fallen short. The other is ‘anomia’ anti-law, lawlessness. In verse fourteen the confession is negative, I have not eaten the sacred portion as a part of my mourning nor while unclean nor have I offered any of these as a memorial to the dead’. The positive affirmation in verse thirteen is that I’m giving ot the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless and the widow. This is the only legitimate use of this tithe. There is a reference to the illegitimate use of this tithe in Hosea 9:4, it apparently occurred quite often. The statement in verse thirteen ‘I have brought away the hallowed thing out of my house’ can be rendered ‘I have cleaned out the holy out of my house’ I have cleaned out of my house that what belongs to the Lord, it is His property not ours. Once we gain our income God’s portion cannot remain with us, it becomes stolen property if it remains with us. Therefore, we must clean it out of our house. The ancient Rabbis as well as the church fathers over the centuries have called this text a confession. The term confession is usually applied to confessions of sin but not necessarily so.

It refers here to a confession of gratitude to God’s past and present mercies and of our obligations to Him. Tithing is a confession of debt and of gratitude. We pay God’s tax gratefully, we are not giving God a tip, we are proclaiming Him to be our redeemer King and Lord when we tithe. Therefore to confess I have cleaned out the holy from my house or removed or put away the tithe to the poor was the statement on the third year that all [unknown] in the tithe were settled. The third year was known as the year of removal and this term is still used in Jewish Orthodoxy. This prayer was thus made after all the tithe was given to the poor. The expression ‘look down from Thy holy habitation from heaven’ appears in Second Chronicles 6:12-42 repeatedly so that Solomon was mindful of this obligation. This was a tithe very, very faithfully practiced in the early church, the medieval church, the reformation church and until very modern times. This confession was known in Hebrew as the confession of tithing and seen as a basic confession of faith. Faith put into practice. The tithe tells us that the basic agent in charity is the family. When the state takes over charity and turns it into welfarism there is no gratitude and what develops is that the recipients begin to feel it is their right. It reaches the point that it reached in Rome where the welfare mobs finally got that right for their children to the end of time, supposedly. It became a hereditary right. What statist welfarism does is to destroy charity, create an entitlement mentality that then destroys the society that embarks upon it. In scripture this tithe is as we have seen called the holy or hallowed thing. So that each family holds a sacred fund that belongs to God and is basic and fundamental to the work of the kingdom whether it be worship, schooling, charity or like activities.

These are activities essential to government and they rest in the family and in the tithe. They tell us tithe to be blessed, tithe and prosper. Where these essential services are transferred to the state both the services, the family and the society suffer. In Colonial and early America there were in every area hundreds, literally hundreds, of tithing agencies to minister to every kind of need imaginable. Where these essential services are transferred to the state both the services, the family and society suffers. Railing against socialism and the high cost of government is futile if we do not seek God’s remedy. Memory is here linked to gratitude and to government, self- government. When we are grateful to God we do His will and bidding and we reorder our lives and income to His service we therefore reorder ourselves and history. I mentioned the article I wrote about two months ago for the Chalcedon Report on the forgotten John Calvin. Only one book has called attention to what I dealt with there, a book published in Switzerland and with a very meager sale. The modern church, Protestant and Catholic alike, is not much interested in what over the generations was a basic part of Christian faith. Most of government was in the hands of people because they took care of, through one or another tithe, health education and welfare. Take those away from the state and you have just the policing power to deal with criminals.

We usually get a flood of mail for various articles, I have not yet received one on that article. It’s almost an antiquarian thing to most people, interesting that he was that way and that he applied that in Geneva, but of course our times are different apparently. And so we slide from Christian self-government into welfarism and socialism, we follow the way of Rome and other civilizations which took away government from the individual and put it entirely in the hands of the state and perished. I am glad to report that despite the lack of response to that article things are happening and a variety of groups, some of them very closely associated with us, are moving into one continent after another to accomplish precisely what this tithe calls for. To reorder society with Christian charity, to take back government in one sphere after another from the state, to recognize that Calvin was right when he said there were two tests of a true church, the faithful preaching of the word and the ministry to those in need. Let us pray.

Our Father we thank Thee for Thy word. We pray that Thou wouldst use us to restore government to the family and to persons in Christ. To make the people who call themselves by Thy name mindful of their worldwide responsibilities. Use us mightily in that task oh Lord, in Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Question] Even welfare today is not considered charity.

[Rushdoony] No it’s entitlement. Welfare today is an entitlement and that sense of entitlement is growing rapidly and one of the byproducts is a growing hatred of charity, a rejection of the idea. I think it was about twenty years ago in one of our early issues of the Journal of Christian Reconstruction that someone reported to us and wrote it up that their church and Christian school was giving food and clothing to the poor and they had advertised the fact but what happened was and the food and clothing came from wholesalers, discarded or slightly damaged things, many people who came to the door and found it was a church, the address they had been given, turned and walked away because they said ‘I don’t want charity, I’m entitled to what I need’. Now that’s the attitude that has been created and it’s a dangerous attitude. Any other questions or comments? Yes?

[Question] A Christian society is the only one that has extended charity to the rest of the world and to other people. Judaism has not sent missions around the world and [unknown].

[Rushdoony] No other religion has been given to charity the world over as Otto observed as have Christians. And this has been on a phenomenal scale, nobody has really written an analysis of what even now what it is not intense a concern as it was a hundred years ago how many people the world over are educated or housed, fed, clothed, as a result of Christian ministries. There’s no desire to report that story. We are told of some of the problems in these countries and how we as a government should provide aid, most of which doesn’t reach the grassroots level.

We’re not told about the many hospitals in places like Africa maintained by missionaries that have been shut down and the health consequences of the departure of Christians, of missionaries, of missionary doctors. We are going to reap a fearful harvest from the damage done to Christian activities the world over by various national and international agencies. Yes?

[Question] Well foreign aid is tied to control over those governments.

[Rushdoony] Yes, that’s a very essential point and you should write about that some time Otto. Foreign aid is tied to controlling foreign governments whereas Christian charity has always been tied to helping people. A world of difference between the two. Our charity as a nation and through the U.N. is not charity. Yes?

[Question] Well the Christian poor tithe is a way of, one of the key elements of restoring Christian reconstruction.

[Rushdoony] The Christian poor tithe is a key element to…oh restoring, yes. It is, and this is why we have been doing a great deal of planning in this sphere to extend our activities, they may not be of the kind that will get us attention again on 20/20 but they will be a way of furthering far more what we intend to do. We planned at a recent planning session to devote an issue of the fall Chalcedon Report to an account of some of the things that are being done. Any other questions or comments? Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, it is good for us to be here, Thy word is truth and Thy word is a lamp in the darkness and on our way. Strengthen us by Thy word and by Thy spirit and make us faithful servants in Thy kingdom. And now go in peace, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, bless you and keep you, guide and protect you, this day and always, Amen.