Everyone knows that stealing is wrong. Even people who don’t read the Bible know the eighth commandment, which says, “You shall not steal” (Exod. 20:15). To steal is to take something that doesn’t belong to you. The Hebrew word for stealing (ganaf) literally means to carry something away, as if by stealth. To give a more technical definition, to steal is to appropriate someone else’s property unlawfully.
What the eighth commandment forbids seems very simple. However, most people fail to understand its full meaning. Like the rest of God’s law, the prohibition on stealing is comprehensive:
Ganaf—stealing—covers all conventional types of theft: burglary (breaking into a home or building to commit theft); robbery (taking property directly from another using violence or intimidation); larceny (taking something without permission and not returning it); hijacking (using force to take goods in transit or seizing control of a bus, truck, plane, etc.); shoplifting (taking items from a store during business hours without paying for them); and pickpocketing and purse-snatching. The term ganaf also covers a wide range of exotic and complex thefts … [such as] embezzlement (the fraudulent taking of money or other goods entrusted to one’s care). There is extortion (getting money from someone by means of threats or misuses of authority), and racketeering (obtaining money by any illegal means).2
This is only a partial list of the countless ways people violate the eighth commandment. They pilfer public property, stealing supplies from hospitals, building sites, and churches. In fact, one hotel reported in its first year of business having to replace 38,000 spoons, 18,000 tiles, 355 coffee pots … and 100 Bibles!3
Citizens steal from the government by underpaying their taxes or making false claims for disability and Social Security. The government steals too. With its huge bureaucracy, the federal government commits theft on a national scale by wasting public money and by accumulating debt without fully planning to repay. Deficit spending is really a way of stealing from future citizens.
There is also theft at work. Employees fill in false time cards and call in sick when they want a day off. They help themselves to office supplies, make long-distance phone calls, and pad their expense accounts. Sometimes they go so far as to embezzle, but a more common workplace theft is simply failing to put in a full day’s work. Instead, workers idle away their time, sitting in their offices and surfing the Internet, sending e-mail to friends—even playing computer games. Whenever we give anything less than our best effort, we are robbing our employer of the productivity we owe.
These are not victimless crimes. Employee theft of time and property costs American businesses and their investors more than 200 billion dollars a year. This affects all of us. According to some estimates, as much as one-third of a product’s cost goes to cover the various forms of stealing that occur on its way to the marketplace. This “theft surcharge,” as analysts call it, is a drag on our whole economy.
For their part, employers often steal from their workers. They demand longer hours than contracts allow. They downsize their workforce to improve their profits, and then the workers who still have jobs end up doing all their own work plus the work that used to be done by the people who were laid off! This is just a sophisticated way for companies to steal from their best employees.
Large corporations steal from the general public. They keep some of their transactions off the books. They hide their losses in offshore accounts. They manipulate securities by providing false information. One of the worst offenders in recent history was Enron, the vast energy company whose spectacular collapse in 2001 injured the whole U.S. economy and cost some people their life savings. Enron’s fall was quickly followed by a series of others, as Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Adelphia, Rite-Aid, and other well-known corporations were caught cheating the public. The nefarious executives from these companies knew all the tricks, but this is hardly a recent phenomenon.
Martin Luther identified certain men of his day as “gentlemen swindlers or big operators. Far from being picklocks and sneak-thieves who loot a cash box, they sit in office chairs and are called great lords and honorable, good citizens, and yet with a great show of legality they rob and steal.”4 And John Calvin said, “It follows, therefore, that not only are those thieves who secretly steal the property of others, but those also who seek gain from the loss of others, accumulate wealth by unlawful practices and are more devoted to their private advantage than to equity.”5
Many common business practices are immoral, even if technically they are not illegal. This is especially true in marketing. What many business people consider good salesmanship actually violates the eighth commandment. There is price-gouging, in which the laws of supply and demand are used to take advantage of helpless consumers. There is false advertising and deceptive packaging, which is designed to make a product look bigger and better than it actually is. Salesmen exaggerate the value of their products, trying to sell people things they really don’t need. Before the sale, every car is touted as the finest vehicle in automotive history, but once the sale is made, and it’s time to talk about a service contract, suddenly the car is going to need all kinds of repairs that ought to be paid for in advance! And so it goes.
These practices are all violations of the eighth commandment. Calvin was right when he said, “Let us remember that all those arts whereby we acquire the possessions and money of our neighbors—when such devices depart from sincere affection to a desire to cheat or in some manner to harm—are to be considered as thefts.”6 Similarly, Luther said that we break the eighth commandment whenever we “tak[e] advantage of our neighbor in any sort of dealing that results in loss to him.”7 How much business fails to measure up to this simple standard? Much of it falls into what Scott Adams aptly terms the Weasel Zone—that “gigantic gray area between good moral behavior and outright felonious activities.”8
Then there is all the theft that is tied up with credit. There is usury, the lending of money at exorbitant rates of interest in order to make unjust profits. Today the most blatant offenders are credit card companies that charge interest at nearly 20 percent or more. The same sin is committed on a larger scale by international banks that hold debtor nations in fiscal bondage. This is only one small aspect of a much wider problem, which is that a small minority uses the vast majority of the world’s resources—and does everything they can to protect their advantage. But the Bible teaches that the poor need our help and that they should receive loans free of interest, at least within the community of God’s people (Lev. 25:35–38; Deut. 15:7, 8). There is another side to this, of course, which is that some people buy on credit without ever intending to repay. No doubt this helps explain why in recent decades credit card debt has risen from five billion to more than 500 billion dollars.
The list goes on. There is insurance fraud, the filing of false claims. There are the deliberate cost overruns that make up the difference between the estimate and the final price whenever work is contracted. There is the theft of intellectual property and the violation of copyrights, including the unlawful duplication of music and videos. There is plagiarism, the misappropriation of someone else’s work. Then there is identity theft, in which personal information is stolen off the Internet and used to run up outrageous charges.
There are countless ways to steal. The Heidelberg Catechism summarizes by saying that in the eighth commandment, “God forbids not only outright theft and robbery, but also such wicked schemes and devices as false weights and measures, deceptive merchandising, counterfeit money, and usury; we must not defraud our neighbor in any way, whether by force or by show of right. In addition God forbids all greed and all abuse or squandering of his gifts” (A. 110). The trouble is that when it comes to stealing, nearly everyone is doing it. Yet nearly 90 percent of evangelical Christians claim that they never break the eighth commandment.9 This statistic is hardly encouraging. What it shows is that Christians have forgotten what stealing really means. The truth is that theft is pervasive at every level of American society, and like everyone else, we are in on the take. But this is not just an American problem. The whole human race is a band of thieves, and we all suffer the loss. Martin Luther said, “If we look at mankind in all its conditions, it is nothing but a vast, wide stable full of great thieves.”10 He also speculated what would happen if we were all brought to justice. “It is the smallest part of the thieves that are hung,” he said. “If we’re to hang them all, where shall we get rope enough? We must make all our belts and straps into halters.”11
GOD’S PROVIDENCE, OUR STEWARDSHIP
What’s wrong with stealing anyway? Like the rest of God’s law, the eighth commandment has deep spiritual significance. Whenever we take something that doesn’t belong to us—however we do it—we sin against God as well as against our neighbor.
Stealing is a sin against God in at least two ways. First, every theft is a failure to trust in his provision. Whenever we take something that doesn’t belong to us, we deny that God has given us or is able to give us everything we truly need. Therefore, keeping the eighth commandment is a practical exercise of our faith in God’s providence.
Every theft is also an assault on God’s providence for others. This is a second way that stealing is a sin against God: It robs what he has provided for someone else. Here it is important to understand that the eighth commandment assumes a right of ownership. By saying, “You shall not steal,” God indicated that people have a right to own their private property. Otherwise, the whole concept of stealing would fail to make any sense. Only something that belongs to someone can be stolen from them. But the reason that anything belongs to anyone is because it comes from God, and we do not have the right to take for ourselves what God has given to others.
This brings us to the positive side of the eighth commandment. What the Bible means by ownership is not possessing things to use for our own purposes, but receiving things from God to use for his glory. So at the same time that we are forbidden to take things that don’t belong to us, we are required to use what we have in ways that are pleasing to our God. To put it very simply, the eighth commandment isn’t just about stealing—it’s also about stewardship.
A steward is someone who cares for someone else’s property. He is not free to use it however he pleases, but only to manage it in accordance with his master’s intentions. This is our situation exactly. Whatever we possess is God’s property, and he has given us the sacred trust of looking after it. This is the way it has been since the beginning. Adam did not own any property, he just managed it: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Gen. 2:15). As Calvin explained,
[T]he custody of the garden was given in charge to Adam, to show that we possess the things which God has committed to our hands, on the condition, that being content with a frugal and moderate use of them, we should take care of what shall remain.… [T]hat this economy, and this diligence, with respect to those good things which God has given us to enjoy, may flourish among us; let every one regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses. Then he will neither conduct himself dissolutely, nor corrupt by abuse those things which God requires to be preserved.12
Like Adam, we are called to be good stewards of God’s world.
Good stewardship means taking care of what we have been given, not letting things fall into disrepair. It means not being wasteful. Whenever we squander money that could be better spent on something else, we are guilty of a kind of theft. This is one of the problems with gambling, which has become one of the most common ways of breaking the eighth commandment. Each year Americans spend more money on various forms of gambling than they do on food or clothing. “What’s wrong with that?” some may ask. The Southern Baptist Convention has provided an excellent answer:
While the Bible contains no “thou shalt not” in regard to gambling, it does contain many insights and principles which indicate that gambling is wrong. The Bible emphasizes the sovereignty of God in the direction of human events (see Matthew 10:29–30); gambling looks to chance and good luck. The Bible indicates that man is to work creatively and use his possessions for the good of others (see Ephesians 4:28); gambling fosters a something-for-nothing attitude. The Bible calls for careful stewardship; gambling calls for reckless abandon. The Bible condemns covetousness and materialism (see Matthew 6:24–34); gambling has both at its heart. The moral thrust of the Bible is love for God and neighbor (Matthew 22:37–40); gambling seeks personal gain and pleasure at another person’s loss and pain.13
Good stewardship also means working hard. The Bible is very specific about this. The book of Proverbs teaches that laziness leads to poverty (6:10, 11). This is not the only cause of poverty, of course, but it is one of them. Poverty, in turn, brings the temptation to steal (Prov. 30:8, 9). One obvious way to avoid this temptation is to work hard for honest gain, with the goal of becoming financially independent (see 1 Thess. 4:11, 12). The Bible says, “He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need” (Eph. 4:28). In other words, the burglar must become a benefactor, as Zacchaeus did when he made restitution for his many sins against the eighth commandment (Luke 19:8). As soon as we realize what we have stolen, it is our responsibility to pay back what we owe, and then some.
This brings us to the last aspect of good stewardship, which is giving away what God has given to us so that other people will have what they need. Jerry Bridges has observed that there are three basic attitudes we can take toward possessions. The first says, “What’s yours is mine; I’ll take it.” This is the attitude of the thief. The second says, “What’s mine is mine; I’ll keep it.” Since we are selfish by nature, this is the attitude that most people have most of the time. The third attitude—the godly attitude—says, “What’s mine is God’s; I’ll share it.”14
Christians are called to live generously. We do not work simply to satisfy our own desires, but also to provide for others. This is not to say that we can never enjoy what God has given us. After all, enjoying God’s gifts is one aspect of good stewardship. But Christians who are as wealthy as we are should always be thinking about what we can give to someone else. It is only in this way that money loses its power over us. As Kent Hughes has said, “Every time I give, I declare that money does not control me. Perpetual generosity is a perpetual de-deification of money.”15
Good stewardship starts with meeting the needs of our families. Then it extends to the church and to the global work of the gospel. Finally, it reaches out to the poor in our own community and around the world. The Bible says, “Give generously … and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to” (Deut. 15:10). The consequences of such generosity will last forever. As A. W. Tozer once explained, “Any temporal possession can be turned into everlasting wealth. Whatever is given to Christ is immediately touched with immortality.”16 To put this another way, the only money we can count on ever seeing again is the money we invest in the kingdom of God. Jesus said, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matt. 6:19–21).
If we fail to make this investment, we are guilty of breaking the eighth commandment. The famous fourth-century preacher Chrysostom served a wealthy congregation in the great city of Constantinople. Chrysostom was well-known for challenging his people not to be stingy. On one occasion he said,
This also is theft, not to share one’s possessions. Perhaps this statement seems surprising to you, but do not be surprised.… Just as an official in the imperial treasury, if he neglects to distribute where he is ordered, but spends instead for his own indolence, pays the penalty and is put to death, so also the rich man is a kind of steward of the money which is owed for distribution to the poor. He is directed to distribute it to his fellow servants who are in want. So if he spends more on himself than his needs require, he will pay the harshest penalty hereafter. For his own goods are not his own, but belong to his own fellow servants.… I beg you remember this without fail, that not to share our own wealth with the poor is theft from the poor and deprivation of their means of life; we do not possess our own wealth but theirs.17
THE TENT OF THIEVES
There are many thieves in the stories of the Bible, but the most audacious was probably Achan. Achan was a soldier in Israel’s army. He fought in the battle of Jericho, when the Israelites marched around the city until the walls fell down.
On the morning of that famous victory, General Joshua gave his troops the order of the day. He commanded them, “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city! The city and all that is in it are to be devoted to the Lord.… But keep away from the devoted things, so that you will not bring about your own destruction by taking any of them. Otherwise you will make the camp of Israel liable to destruction and bring trouble on it. All the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron are sacred to the Lord and must go into his treasury” (Josh. 6:16b, 17a, 18, 19). This was holy war. The Israelites were not fighting for their own advantage but for the glory of God. They were agents of his divine justice, and as such they were not allowed to claim the spoils of battle. Everything was to be devoted to the Lord, upon the pain of death.
In the battle everything went according to plan. The people cried out, the walls collapsed, and the Israelites conquered the Canaanites: “They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it.… Then they burned the whole city and everything in it, but they put the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron into the treasury of the Lord’s house” (Josh. 6:21a, 24). The soldiers did everything that Joshua commanded.
Except for Achan. In the aftermath of the battle, as he rummaged through the wreckage, Achan’s heart was captured by the city’s treasure: gold, silver, and fancy clothes with designer labels. “There’s so much stuff here,” he must have said to himself, “that if I took something, no one would ever notice it was missing.” The more treasure he saw, the more he wanted some of it for himself. “After all,” Achan reasoned, “I’m a soldier in this army, and I deserve some kind of reward for fighting!”
Achan started thinking about how he could smuggle some of the treasure back to his tent. As his mind worked through the possibilities, he decided to go for it. He “saw in the plunder a beautiful robe from Babylonia, two hundred shekels of silver and a wedge of gold weighing fifty shekels” (Josh. 7:21a). He coveted them, he stole them, and then he hurried back to his tent. When he arrived—breathless—he dug a hole in the ground to hide all his loot. It would be their little family secret.
As robberies go, Achan didn’t take much. In today’s market it would amount to something like a five hundred dollar suit, a few hundred dollars of silver, and several thousand dollars’ worth of gold. Yet that one modest theft brought death and destruction on Israel. The defeat came quickly. After his great success against Jericho, Joshua was eager to attack the next city. The general sent his scouts to spy out the region, and soon they returned to say that their next target would be easy pickings. Joshua didn’t even need to send out his whole army; several thousand soldiers would be more than enough. Yet to their shock and dismay, the Israelites were badly beaten.
To Joshua this seemed like a military crisis. After he had managed to retreat, he threw himself down on the ground and complained to God. But the Lord said to him:
Stand up! What are you doing down on your face? Israel has sinned; they have violated my covenant, which I commanded them to keep. They have taken some of the devoted things; they have stolen, they have lied, they have put them with their own possessions. That is why the Israelites cannot stand against their enemies; they turn their backs and run because they have been made liable to destruction. I will not be with you anymore unless you destroy whatever among you is devoted to destruction. (Josh. 7:10–12)
The problem was that someone had violated the eighth commandment. So God proceeded to give instructions for identifying and then executing the thief.
The next morning the whole nation was brought before Joshua for judgment. Achan was there, at first wondering what it was all about, and then desperately hoping that his sin would remain undiscovered. He probably said to himself, Come on, with a million people here, how could the general ever find out? The tribes were called forward, Judah was taken by lot, and Achan’s heart jumped into his throat. Judah! Why, that was his tribe. What were the chances of that! Then all the clans of Judah stepped forward, and the descendants of Zerah were taken, and guess whose grandfather that was! Achan’s, of course, and the blood drained from his face. The Zerahites came forward, and the family of Zimri was taken. Then Achan knew that he was a dead man, because Zimri was his father. One by one every member of the family went forward, until finally Joshua came to Achan, the thief.
Shortly before he died, Moses had told the Israelites that if they obeyed God he would give them the Promised Land. But he also warned them, “[I]f you fail to do this [to keep their oath before God], you will be sinning against the Lord; and you may be sure that your sin will find you out” (Num. 32:23). This is exactly what happened to Achan: His sin found him out, which is not surprising because it was such a stupid sin to commit in the first place. It’s one thing to hide stolen property, but to really gain anything by his theft, Achan would have to use what he had taken. Think about it: When would he ever be able to wear his fancy robe or show off his cache of precious metals?
Achan never got the chance, and in the end he lost everything. Joshua forced him to confess his crime in front of the whole nation. Then messengers were sent to look for the stolen goods. Sure enough, they were buried in the thief’s tent. The messengers brought everything back where everyone could see it. “Then Joshua, together with all Israel, took Achan son of Zerah, the silver, the robe, the gold wedge … and all that he had, to the Valley of Achor. Joshua said, ‘Why have you brought this trouble on us? The Lord will bring trouble on you today.’ Then all Israel stoned him” (Josh. 7:24, 25). Achan lost everything—including his life—and all for the sake of ill-gotten booty.
Why did God treat Achan so harshly? It was partly to make an example of Achan, so that everyone would know that God is holy and that he wants his people to be holy too. What better way to deter other would-be thieves from even thinking about taking something that belonged to God? But it was also a matter of justice. Achan was guilty of breaking the eighth commandment. He had broken it, not just by stealing from Jericho, but by stealing from God. This is what made his crime so heinous. All the spoils of battle belonged to God. They were designated for his house, where they would be dedicated to his praise. What Achan took belonged to God, and thus he was guilty of the greatest of all thefts: robbing God of his glory.
BETWEEN TWO THIEVES
Achan’s sin and its punishment stand as a warning to anyone who steals anything that belongs to God. There are many ways to do this. One of the most obvious is to use our money for ourselves rather than giving generously back to God. Everything we have belongs to God. While he gives us the freedom to use what we need, he also calls us to give for the work of his gospel, and to neglect this duty is to rob God.
Most Christians would deny that they are stealing from God. They would deny it the way the Israelites denied it in the days of Malachi. When that faithful prophet told them they were robbing God, they were deeply offended. “How do we rob him?” they asked. God answered by saying, “In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse—the whole nation of you—because you are robbing me. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this … and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it” (Mal. 3:8–10). A tithe is 10 percent, and this is a useful guideline for Christian giving, but God does not operate on a percentage basis. How much we give to the church is a matter of Christian freedom. However, we should always try to give more and more, and to give less than we can is spiritual theft.
Another way to rob God is to fail to give him the best of our time and our talents. All our abilities and opportunities come from God, and they are all to be used for his glory. The Bible says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men” (Col. 3:23). When we waste our time, or fail to develop our gifts to their highest potential, we are robbing God.
Still another way to rob God is to break his law, and thus to deny him our obedience. Every violation of the Ten Commandments involves some form of theft. Bowing down to idols steals God’s worship. Desecrating the Sabbath steals his holy day. Murder steals life; adultery steals purity; lying steals the truth. But the real theft is that every sin we commit dishonors God, and thus steals the glory that our lives ought to give him.
Are you a thief? One of the benefits of studying the Ten Commandments is that they confront us with our sin. When we explore their full implications, we discover we are not able to keep a single commandment in all its integrity. So the law condemns us. It declares, “You are the idolater. You are the foul-mouthed sinner. You are the Sabbath-breaker and the rebel. You are the murderer, the adulterer, and the thief.” The law says all this to show that we are guilty sinners who need the gospel.
The gospel is the good news that Jesus died on the cross and rose again to give salvation to everyone who believes in him. Jesus died on the cross in the place of sinners—specifically, in the place of thieves. The Bible says that when Jesus was crucified, “Two robbers were crucified with him, one on his right and one on his left” (Matt. 27:38), thus fulfilling the prophecy that the Savior would be “numbered with the transgressors” (Isa. 53:12). In his crucifixion, Jesus was considered a thief. Martin Luther explained the situation like this:
Christ is innocent so far as His own Person is concerned; therefore He should not have been hanged from the tree. But because, according to the Law, every thief should have been hanged, therefore, according to the Law of Moses, Christ Himself should have been hanged; for He bore the person of a sinner and a thief—and not of one but of all sinners and thieves. For we are sinners and thieves, and therefore we are worthy of death and eternal damnation. But Christ took all our sins upon Himself, and for them He died on the cross. Therefore it was appropriate for Him to become a thief and, as Isaiah says (53:12), to be “numbered among the thieves.”18
It is well known that Christ was crucified between two thieves. But as far as God’s justice was concerned, there were really three thieves on the cross that day: two who died for their own crimes and one who took our sins upon himself. Luther gave this illustration:
[A] magistrate regards someone as a criminal and punishes him if he catches him among thieves, even though the man has never committed anything evil or worthy of death. Christ was not only found among sinners; but of His own free will and by the will of the Father He wanted to be an associate of sinners, having assumed the flesh and blood of those who were sinners and thieves and who were immersed in all sorts of sin. Therefore when the Law found Him among thieves, it condemned and executed Him as a thief.19
This is a great comfort to everyone who has ever broken the eighth commandment. When Christ died on the cross he died for thieves, so that every thief who trusts in him will be saved. The first thief to be saved was the one hanging next to him on the cross, the one who said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). Jesus gave him the answer he gives to every lawbreaker who turns to him in repentance and faith: “[Y]ou will be with me in paradise” (v. 43).
About Exodus—Saved for God's Glory
In this Preaching the Word volume, Philip Graham Ryken mines the majestic book of Exodus for knowledge of God’s character and instruction for his followers. So much can be learned about God through the accounts of his deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, his many divine interventions for them, and his transformation of them into an independent nation.
Copyright
Published by Crossway Books a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law.
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