October 25, 2015
Series: “Money” 4 of 8
“Tithing”
Introduction
For three weeks now I’ve been saying that the point of this “Money” series isn’t money; it’s Jesus. And I want to keep banging that drum today as we come to the thorny subject of tithing. When you first heard I was preaching on money, you probably assumed that I was going to emphasize tithing with a goal of increasing church giving. But I’ll say again, if giving increases as a result of our encountering biblical truth in this series, praise God! But that’s not my aim. My aim is simply to help us think more biblically about money and act more faithfully with our finances. However, with that being said, no money series can be biblically faithful without addressing tithing.
What’s a tithe? A tithe is a portion of one’s wealth (usually understood biblically as a tenth), and ‘Tithing’ is the giving or dedicating of that portion to God or some God-appointed human representative. Christian interpretations of tithing range from a total rejection to a total embrace of tithing. Rejecting it as an outmoded Old Testament rule moves Christians away from healthy regular and proportional giving to the Lord’s work, while, on the other hand, mandating a ten percent tithe for all pushes us towards a legalistic view of giving. Both extremes make money (not Jesus) the point! My tithing thesis is this: that Christians must understand tithing not as a requirement of law but as a faithful response to grace. I think this statement is helpful because it neither entirely dismisses nor unduly exalts the biblical concept of tithing. And I want to argue this by looking at the biblical evidence for each: for tithing as a binding requirement of law, and for tithing as a free and faithful response to grace.
Tithing as Required by Law
When I first thought of preaching on tithing I wanted to use the famous passage at the end of the Old Testament in Malachi 3:10: “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.” What an awesome challenge and promise from God! But, as much as I a pastor want to use that text to challenge you to tithe, doing so would be to rip it out of an Old Testament environment where tithing was required by law and misapply it to people whom Paul says in Romans 6:14, “no longer live under the law’s requirements but under grace.”
Malachi 3:10 is perhaps the clearest summary of old covenant, law-req-uired tithing. It busts the modern myth of income-based tithing. God doesn’t say, “Bring the tithe into the treasury, that there may be money in my house”? He says, “Bring the tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house.” Old covenant tithing was based on what each farmer’s land and livestock produced. At the end of Leviticus, Moses says, “Every tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land or of the fruit of the trees, is the LORD’s; it is holy to the LORD.” He then says two verses later, “Every tithe of herds and flocks, every tenth animal of all that pass under the herdsman’s staff, shall be holy to the LORD.”
Tithes were required for festivals, for resident aliens, for orphans and widows, and for the farmers who had to let their land rest every seventh year. Old covenant tithing also supported the priestly Levites who served in the temple. But even the Levites weren’t off the hook; Moses tells them in Num. 18:26, “When you take from Israel the tithe that I have given you from them for your inheritance, then you shall present a contribution from it to the LORD, a tithe of a tithe.”
Proportional, food-based tithing was designed to evenly distribute both the burdens of providing for the needy and the blessings received from God for obedience among all the Israelites without cutting into an individual’s ability to make a profit. One commentator explains that if two men each raised ten carrots, they were each required to tithe one carrot. But then if one farmer sold his remain-ing carrots at five cents each and the other at ten cents each, while their profits would be different their tithes were the same. Again, it wasn’t an income tax! But, as we see in Malachi, the priests and the whole nation were abusing the system, disobeying the law by skimping on their tithes, and God was cursing them with drought and crop-devouring pests as a result. Even under legal requirements that are designed to be fair, sinful people always drift toward non-compliance.
Another natural drift of sinners under legal obligations is toward selective compliance (which of course is a form of non-compliance). We see this even in the New Testament when Jesus says in Matthew 23:23: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.” Jesus doesn’t condemn tithing spices; He condemns dishonoring God by neglecting peoples’ needs. Non-compliance and selective compliance are sinful man’s natural tendencies under the law. It’s not a problem with the law; the problem is with man’s rebellious heart.
Some church leaders see Jesus’ affirming the tithing of spices as New Testament grounds for requiring church members to tithe. If Jesus is okay with the scribes and Pharisees tithing, He must still want His followers to tithe too. But the problem with that conclusion is that the old covenant was still in effect when Jesus affirmed the tithing of spices; He hadn’t gone to the cross yet! He hadn’t gone to the cross to void the old covenant of the law and establish a new covenant of grace. And He hadn’t yet inaugurated a new priesthood by offering Himself on the altar of the cross once and for all for sin. But when He does, He manifests a second biblical mode of tithing.
Tithing as a Response to Grace
Notice I’m using the terms old and new ‘covenant’ rather than Old and New ‘Testament’? This is because while, as in Jesus’ encounter with the scribes and Pharisees, the old covenant mode of tithing was still active early in the New Testament, we get glimpses of new covenant tithing deep in the Old Testament. And, unlike old covenant tithing, which was required by law, new covenant tithing is a response to grace.
To me, the most tremendous example of new covenant tithing is found in the description of the early church in Acts 4:34-35, where Luke says: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.” What a beautiful picture of people, under no legal obligation, freely giving all or a portion of their wealth to the apostles’ authority for distributing to those in need! Another great example of new covenant tithing is, ironically, the Bible’s first recorded instance of tithing way back in Genesis 14. You know, God began forming the nation of Israel four hundred years before He gave them the covenant of the law through Moses. Long before tithing was required by law, Abraham gave a tithe as a free and faithful response to God’s blessing of grace. **[READ Gen. 14:17-20]**
Here’s the thing: old covenant tithing and new covenant tithing are similar: people give to God, and God blesses His people. The difference lies in the order in which those things happen in old covenant and new covenant tithing. Abraham gives Melchizedek a tithe, but not until after Melchizedek blesses Abraham. Listen to it one more time:
“And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. (He was priest of God most High.) And he blessed him and said, ‘Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth; and blessed be God Most High who has delivered your enemies into your hand!’ And Abram gave him a tenth of everything.”
Do you hear a command or legal requirement to tithe in that? Me neither. Did anybody tell Abraham to give a tenth? No, the amount was totally up to him.
In Acts 4:34-35, the people give the apostles all or a portion of their land and house proceeds, but what comes before that? In v. 33, Luke says, “With great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.” Is there a legal requirement here? Nope! Did the apostles specify a certain percentage to be given? No. The early church’s giving wasn’t mandated by law; it was purely a free and faithful response of each Christian to God’s initiating act of saving grace, just like Abraham’s tithe.
But in Malachi, what’s the order? God says, “Bring the full tithe into the storehouse…and [then] test me, if I will not open the windows of heaven…and pour down a blessing until there is no more need.” Under the old covenant God promises to bless His people, but His blessings will not fall until after the people obey the command and tithe.
By God’s design, old covenant tithing had to operate this way. Old covenant tithing had to be required by law so that the good law could show us how incapable not only common people but even the priests were of keeping it perfectly. The failure of the old covenant law to make people righteous and the failure of the old covenant priests to be righteous examples points us to the need of a new and better covenant enacted by a new and better Priest.
New Priest, New Covenant
Turn with me to Hebrews 7 in the New Testament. In Hebrews 7 the author gives an excellent explanation of the differences between old covenant, law-required tithing under the Levitical priests and new covenant, grace-response tithing under Melchizedek and Jesus. **[Read Hebrews 7]**
The key verse unlocking Hebrews 7 and the most helpful verse in embracing Christian tithing as a response to grace rather than as a requirement of law is v. 12: “For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well.” Four hundred years after Abraham’s time, the priest-hood changed from Melchizedek to the sons of Aaron—the Levites. And as a result the law of tithing changed too: from a free and faithful response to grace to a binding requirement of the law. This law and those priests reigned from Mt. Sinai to Mt. Calvary. But at the words, “It is finished,” the priesthood changed back (permanently!) to the Melchizedekian order and tithing changed back to an Abrahamic response to grace.
So, there’s my biblical case for viewing tithing as a free and faithful response to God’s grace rather than as a binding requirement of the law. But, even though I have no biblical grounds for mandating that you give or that you give a certain percentage to the Lord’s work, I’m not going to abandon the term ‘tithing’. And here’s why: because I still think there’s value for each Christian and each Christian household in thinking deeply about their finances and developing the discipline of prioritizing a dedicated portion of their wealth to the Lord’s work and of giving proportionally on a regular basis as a matter of faith.
Under the new covenant of grace, the percentage requirement is removed from and the Holy Spirit is given to each believer. This means that I as a pastor am released from worrying about church finances. This means that if the Holy Spirit is truly living in you, just as you’ll never be at ease living in sin, you will never be at ease in simply not responding in some measure to God’s blessing of grace on your life. There may be seasons where you’re giving one carrot; there may be seasons where you’re able to give two carrots, or seasons where you can only give half a carrot. But if ever there’s a season where you aren’t giving any carrot, ask yourself, “Is Jesus still the point of my life? or have money and things taken His place?”
Not Feasible, Faithable!
If you aren’t tithing at all, you need to reexamine your priorities and make Jesus and His global mission the point again. But if you are giving—as I assume many of you are in some regular, proportional capacity—and you wonder if you could do more, let me give you something to think about. I don’t want to be a pastor who challenges you to do things that are feasible. Whether in the realm of witnessing or leading, serving or giving, what’s humanly feasible always falls short of God’s standard. And what’s God’s standard? Faith! So, as you prayerfully reevaluate your finances and your tithing, instead of asking, “What can I feasibly do?” give yourself a little bit of a lisp and then re-ask the question: Not “What can I feasibly do?” but “What can I faithably do?” Families, instead of asking what level or proportion of giving is feasible, ask what level or proportion of giving is faithable. Will the grace God has shown us in sending Jesus to die and save us from sin merit a merely feasible response on our part? Or will we let His grace at work in us raise our response to a faithable level.
FAITH-ABLE. That’s the sweet-spot for Christian living, witnessing, leading, serving, and giving. It’s not about what we can do with our own abilities; it’s about what God can do through us if we trust Him and give Him control.
I’ve said a lot this morning, but nothing I’ve said about tithing or giving to God matters if you’ve yet to receive saving grace from God. And you’ll know you’ve received God’s saving grace if you want to respond to Him in faith—if in the depth of your heart Jesus has become immensely beautiful and desirable.