Love and Tithing

What does love have to do with tithing? For decades, reconciling God’s love with His holiness puzzled me. In raising children, we love them but we also must discipline them, sometimes sternly, in order to teach them right living. (Proverbs 13:24, among 35 total references in Proverbs; Hebrews 12:4-11) It pains us to inflict pain on the children we love. But God is perfect in His love and holiness. How is that possible?

As I came to understand love, it occurred to me (probably with a nudge from the Holy Spirit), that the focus of love being on the best possible outcome for the beloved means that I will forego any action (thought, word, or deed) that would in any way harm or result in less than that outcome. Cause and effect being what define the universe we live in, teaching the beloved by whatever means necessary is doing everything within our power to bring about their best outcome, even when it causes us pain. And since God loves every person, He foregoes anything and everything to bring about that result. Hence Christ laid down His life to atone for their (our) sin. The prohibitions and rules laid down in the Pentateuch define how to live that kind of life, with God’s kind of love for our family, our friends, our neighbors, and everyone else we encounter.

God’s power rests in part on His holiness and love. That is, His power to create and sustain a community of love depends on Him getting His people to voluntarily take on His nature and character. His authority over nature, time and space, human events is simply a tool for this greater outcome. 

What does this have to do with tithing? The command of the Mosaic law for tithing must be interpreted in the context of His love for His people. Simply that we learn and practice trust in God’s heart; that He can take care of the small stuff. He commanded tithing of the first fruits as an act of faith by obedience. Not that we are saved by tithing any more than by keeping other parts of the Mosaic law, but only by faith in the blood of Jesus to forgive our sin. Moving forward, to live for Jesus, in the New Testament we have giving: the story of the widow’s mite (Mark 12:43, Luke 21:3), various collections taken up in one city for relief in another city, and Paul’s words about a pleasing sacrifice (Philippians 4:18). It is not that God needs our money, or that we buy His favor by giving. The underlying principle is that God, in His love and holiness, can take care of the small stuff if we demonstrate that we truly trust Him. (Malachi 3:10) He withheld nothing in His love for us. We can trust His nature  and character, and our goal should be, in all the dimensions of life, to receive this essence of His being into our own lives.

Psalm 128:1 allows two interpretations

How blessed is everyone who fears Yahweh,
Who walks in His ways. (Legacy Standard Bible)

•      One blessing of fearing the Lord enough to heed His teachings and walk in His ways is that we will be far more successful in our earthly life. It is obvious that God places great importance on giving us wisdom in His written word. The Mosaic law, the Proverbs of Solomon, the gospels, and the epistles all contain God’s explanation of how the world works. This is because He understands cause and effect far better than us, because He created the universe. He shares this understanding with His children.

•      God’s blessing takes another form, when we walk in His ways. We take on parts of His nature and character, becoming more like Him, when we do the things He calls us to. Hungering for righteousness, being pure in heart, receiving persecution for His names’ sake, loving with a pure heart, giving freely to those in need, practicing goodness in secret, forgiving others, loving our enemies, focusing our life on God’s kingdom are all examples. This goes beyond the growth in faith that comes from seeing Him fulfill His promises. Malachi 3:10 is the only place that I know of where God invites us to test Him. Once we have seen His faithfulness in blessing our finances after we have given a full ten percent, our faith and trust in Him is established. But He invites to a deeper blessing: being co-participants in His activity to establish the reign of agape love in the lives of those around us.   If we settle for the material blessings He pours out when we tithe, we stop on the first step of that walk with Him, which He invites us to continue.

The Wisdom of Mixing Oil and Water

 With thousands of years of accumulated wisdom in Chinese culture, why does the current government of mainland China implement foolish and self-destructive policies? In one sentence, it is because although this ancient tradition of wisdom points put the folly of sin, it does not have the power to address the root cause of sin; only Jesus can do that. Missionary work of the last two centuries led to the conversion of millions in China, but the current government rejects Christianity, believing instead that the rule of man can bring utopia on earth, in a tradition traced back to Karl Marx. 

It is a maxim of ancient origin that oil and water do not mix. We can observe this physically in the kitchen when we make salad dressing, or when we see an oil slick in the ocean. The reason for this physical non-mixing has been described in multiple ways:

• Water molecules are polar but oils are not; there is no attraction between dissimilar molecule types. Oil molecules do not have a polar part they would need to dissolve in water.
• Water molecules have stronger attraction to each other than to other types of molecules, ditto for oils.
• Water molecules pack differently, much more densely than oil molecules.

Water and oil are both used as metaphors in Scripture for the work of God. We are washed in baptism, sacramentally and symbolically, for the regeneration and new birth of salvation. We are washed by the water of the Word, Scripture being God’s message to us to give us knowledge of Him and His ways, which includes law, prophecy, and wisdom. (Ephesians 5:26) God also gifts us the Holy Spirit, represented by anointing with oil, which denotes His very presence within us, empowering us with both gifts and fruit, to do what He calls us to. (1 Samuel 16:13) We often see  difficulty between believers who follow one or the other of these threads of faith exclusively, either totally devoted to study of Scripture or completely focused on the activity of the Holy Spirit. The reconciliation of these can only be found in the blood of Christ which, when we receive Him, breaks down the barrier between the law and our lives. There is wisdom in the written word, and wisdom is one of the gifts of the Spirit, but its pedagogical and life-experience dimensions are only reconciled through Jesus’ presence in our lives. The right-wrong polarity of the Law mixes with the daily activities of life producing a practical holiness born of God’s love and empowerment when the Holy Spirit uses the word in our immediate situation. 

Returning to the failure of worldly wisdom, the shortcoming of wisdom apart from Jesus is that it lacks power to overcome sin. The nature of man, and the universe that we live in, is that sin is the result of yielding to temptation; temptation is the lure of selfish fulfillment at the expense of true love (seeking the good of the other); temptation is the tool of Satan to destroy us by luring us away from God and His ways. Only Jesus paid the price for our sin and then empowers those who receive Him to live in His power. All worldly traditions of wisdom (not just Chinese culture) lack this power, and ultimately fail to bring about the rule of good. Wisdom and life fail to mix like water and oil, unless the Lord Jesus reconciles them through redemption. We need to personally receive this mixing of wisdom and life through the blood of Christ in order to avoid disaster ourselves.