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Exodus 20:15; Luke 19:1-10

Let me invite you to take your copy of God’s Word and turn with me to Exodus 20:15 and also Luke 19:1-10. We’re up to number 8 in the 10 Commandments; so, let me ask you; how are you doing? Isn’t it amazing how on the one hand we know and believe that these moral commandments need to be taught and emphasized in our society, and yet on the other hand we’re all guilty of breaking them. I mean, we look out at our world and we want to shout from the mountaintop “Remember the 10 Commandments!” But, we know that we’re part of the problem. Thanks be to God that through the forgiveness of Jesus Christ and the guidance and direction and empowerment of the Holy Spirit we can overcome, we can confess, we can live in obedience and faithfulness. Amen?

15 “You shall not steal.”

Our Father, in heaven, how You delight whenever Your children come and offer up any kind of prayer to acknowledge You and draw close to You. Surely, part of our worship is the attention we give as Your Word is spoken. So, may we do that, Lord, with a readiness of mind. Make an application of this eighth commandment to every heart that is here, just as You have done with the previous seven, that our lives would be pleasing to You. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

It doesn’t matter which continent of the globe we put our feet on, we encounter this problem of theft. It’s such a dramatic problem that thieves are making off every year with billions and billions of dollars in tax-free income. The reported figures for theft, which in themselves are astronomical, don’t usually contain the figures (which are even larger) for things like fraud, forgery, embezzlement, bribery, and extortion. The fact is that from petty larceny to multimillion-dollar fraud, stealing in the United States of America is at an all-time high.

Now, all of that would be bad enough if there was, at the same time, a shared conviction concerning the wrongness of stealing – if we could go from person to person, as we might have been able to do at an earlier point in society, and say to one another, “Do you think it’s wrong to steal?” and people would answer, “Yes!” But today that isn’t true. Rather, the Robin Hood principle (if we may call it that) is prevalent all over the place – the kind of thing encapsulated in a book published in August 2020 by Vicky Osterweil titled In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. She says, “In terms of potential crimes that people can commit against the state, [looting] is basically nonviolent. You’re mass shoplifting. Most stores are insured; it’s just hurting insurance companies on some level. It’s just money. It’s just property. It’s not actually hurting any people…”

That’s what we’re talking about – the idea that it isn’t wrong as long as no one feels it or it’s not affecting the immediate person next-door to me or somehow or another I can explain it away. This morning I want to pose two questions and consider one example as we consider this eighth commandment.

Why Is It Wrong

Now, you might find that to be a silly question, especially in church, but sometimes we need to ask the obvious questions before we can make any significant progress and understanding in dealing with our own issues. Someone might say, “Well, the Bible tells us that it’s wrong to steal.” Yes, that’s true, but why does God tell us that? See, inherent and underpinning this question and commandment are two very important biblical principles, and they’re these: 1.) the right to private property, and 2.) the sovereign ownership of God.

Have you ever thought about that? The 8th commandment presupposes personal property rights. The logic runs like this: God wouldn’t give this commandment if He didn’t also give us the right to own property. If personal property rights weren’t somehow afforded by God, then there wouldn’t be a need to instruct mankind about not stealing. So, this eighth commandment, while given to us in the negative, also affirms the positive, which is the right to personal property.

And the second principle is closely associated with the first. Whatever personal property we own is ultimately under the sovereign ownership of God. In the grand scheme of things, we don’t own anything. We’re just stewards. Oh, sure, from a human perspective we own things, but ultimately, we don’t own anything. Ownership is only a thing as long as we’re living, and since we’re all on a one-way trip to the grave everything that we think we own is really only on loan.

James 1:17 says, “Every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father above, in whom there is no variableness, neither shadow due to turning” (paraphrased). All that I have is God’s, not mine. Forget this “90 percent is mine and 10 percent is God’s.” One hundred percent is God’s. It’s not mine. We’re only looking after it for a while. After all, it’s all going to go in a garage sale one day or we’re going to leave it behind in some form of inheritance, but it’s not ours.

So, when we steal from another person, we don’t simply steal from them or sin against them; we also sin against God. When we steal from somebody else, what we’re doing is not only harming them, but disregarding them, and devaluing them. And in doing that, we sin against God, because it’s He who has given them what they have, it’s He who has given them regard, and it’s because of Him that they have value.

This is exemplified so perfectly when David, in his great prayer of confession in Psalm 51, after his sin with Bathsheba, comes before God acknowledging what he had done, and he cries out to God in Psalm 51:4, “Against You, [and] You only, have I sinned.” Now, what were the facts? He’d sinned against multiple people. He’d sinned against his friends. He’d sinned against Bathsheba. He’d sinned against Uriah (Bathsheba’s husband) by having him killed. He violated her reputation. He violated the sanctity of her home. His theft was all over the place. And yet, when he expresses it before God, he says, “Against Thee, [and] Thee only, have I sinned” (KJV).

You take the Prodigal Son; after he’d gone off to a far country (Luke 15) and had squandered “his substance with riotous living,” then “he came to himself and he said, ‘I’ll arise and go to my father, and I’ll say to my father, “I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and I’m no longer worthy to be called your son.’” Well, his sin was all over the place, but when you boil sin down, the greatest offense in sin is not what it does to me, not what it does to you, but what it does to the Father.

And when we steal, we sin against God. That’s why it’s wrong. ’Cause God said, “Don’t do it.” And He’s God, we’re not. “Do you mean it’s as simple as that?” Yeah! Then why do people do it? Well, number one, because they don’t believe in a God who has authority over creation, and two, even if they do, they don’t believe that He should have authority over us. So, we need to be very clear. We are sinning against God. It offends His holy name. It disregards His law. And it devalues His creation when we steal.

How Do We Break It

I want to move through this as quickly as I can, but I want us to notice that there are multiple ways that we break this command.

Number one, we break it by blatant theft. Going somewhere we shouldn’t and taking stuff. Most of us, if we’re honest, had our first taste of this when we were youngsters. Someone dared us, or double-dog dared us, to take something that wasn’t ours. Even if you remained squeaky clean (morally) and never swiped a pack of gum or stole anything, if you had siblings, then you likely went into their room or into their personal stuff (diaries and so forth) and you tasted the sin of stealing. Blatant theft.

Number two, we break it when we borrow and fail to return. This second one kind of creeps up on us doesn’t it. Men you’re thinking through your garages, aren’t you? Ladies, you’re going through the basement or the attic aren’t you. How about your bookshelves or your music collections? Are all of those books and vinyl records? See, if we make a career of borrowing stuff which we never return, we’re actually making a career of theft. We just call it borrowing. Psalm 37:21 says, “The wicked borrow and do not repay.”

Number three, we break this commandment when we fiddle the books – when we use false weights and measures. You get a lot of this in the Minor Prophets. Listen to Amos 8:5; this is God telling Israel what He knows they’re thinking: “’When will the New Moon be over that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath… ended that we may market wheat?’ – skimping the measure, boosting the price and cheating with dishonest scales.”

So, you take the bag and you fill it with more air and less chips. You sell a used car and you don’t disclose that the sunroof isn’t working and the back door doesn’t lock/unlock and the spare tire hasn’t seen the light of day since you purchased the vehicle 10 years ago. But, oh, it’s worth every dollar you’re asking. It’s stealing. False weights and measures are a form of stealing.

Number four, we steal when we misuse our employer’s property or our employer’s time. In a book titled The Day America Told the Truth, we’re told that “workers around America frankly admit that they spend more than 20 percent of their time at work totally goofing off.” Twenty percent of every day is goof-off. If you’re working a 5-day work week, then that’s an entire day allotted to nothing. Basically, we’ve got America working a four-day week. Half the people “admit to chronic malingering, calling in sick when [they’re] not sick, and doing it regularly.” So, we steal with our time and we steal with our work. We steal when we use the phone when we shouldn’t. We steal when we fiddle our expense accounts. We steal when we walk out the door with a bucketful of supplies to do a little job on our backyard when, in reality, that material was only there for doing work for our employer.

Number five, we break the eighth commandment when we just flat-out waste other people’s possessions. In Luke 16:1, there’s the story of the “rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions.” So, perhaps we rented a house, and we said, “Hey, this isn’t our house. We pay the rent. So, what if the carpet’s trashed? So, what if the hinges don’t work? So, what if I don’t take care of the windows?” What we’re saying is it’s okay just to steal from our landlord. We’re wasting what belongs to someone else.

Number six, we steal from others when we pay bad wages or we withhold wages or delay the payment of wages. James 5:4 says: “The wages you failed to pay your workmen are crying out to you from the fields.” Now, obviously, I don’t live my life in the world of macroeconomics. But something inside of me says just because a guy is prepared, because of his country of origin, to work for very little in comparison to somebody in the United States of America, that does not validate our payment of that individual at that level. I don’t see how it does. And yet we do it. We do it on a huge, national scale.

Number seven, we break this commandment when we fail to take care of our parents when they need help. When we decide that all that our parents have provided for us we can just take and forget them in their point of need, we steal from them. Proverbs 28:24, “He who robs his father [and] mother and says, “It’s not wrong” – he is partner to him who destroys.”

Number eight, we steal from other people when we take away their sexual purity. You say, “Well, wasn’t that last Sunday?” Well, in some ways it’s last Sunday, it’s this Sunday, it’s every Sunday. I haven’t forgotten what it was like to be a teenager. But I tell you again this morning: you cannot play fast and loose with the moral life of the girl you’re dating or the fellow you’re dating. Two more…

Number nine, we steal from others when we cheat in the context of the classroom. And just so you know; I know that most of you haven’t been in a classroom in 50-60 years, but we have a few that are and I didn’t want them getting off. When we follow someone else’s work, we cheat, because we steal their time, we steal their intellect, we steal their endeavor. And again, we seek to exalt ourselves on the basis of the harm and disregard and devaluation which we demonstrate towards them.

Finally, we steal by failing to give God what we owe Him. Malachi 3:8 says “Will a man rob God?” And the issue was that Israel was holding back rather than giving to God. They weren’t prepared to trust God to provide for them, to “throw open in the floodgates of heaven and pour out” the blessing that they couldn’t contain. When God’s people are prepared to trust God and not seek to steal from God, recognizing that everything comes from God, then the blessings which He will pour out upon His people are unimaginable. It has to do with money. It has to do with time. It has to do with intellect, with our will, and with our talents.

A Good Example

Finally, there’s a good example of the transformation of a thief given to us in the Bible. Let’s look at Luke 19.

1 He entered Jericho and was passing through. 2 And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He was a chief tax collector and was rich. 3 And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. 4 So he ran on ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see [Jesus], for He was about to pass that way. 5 And when Jesus came to the place, He looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.” 6 So he hurried and came down and received Him joyfully. 7 And when they saw it, they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” 8 And Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” 9 And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

You know what I find fascinating about that story? Well, there are a lot of things, but the most obvious is that we aren’t told anything about the meeting. We aren’t given any details about what was said, or what they did inside, only that Zacchaeus comes out and promises to give back to all those he’s defrauded. See, I think Jesus and Zacchaeus went over the 10 Commandments and when they got to number 8 Zacchaeus knew he’d been found out.

Jesus would’ve told Zacchaeus, “Zacchaeus, if you were to work for the rest of your life and give money to everybody that walked the streets of Jericho, if you were never to steal again, if you were to become Mr. Nice Guy, if you were to labor with your hands, if you were to be zealous with your mind, you could never repay the debt that you owe to Almighty God for breaking His law. Zacchaeus, you’re a dead man.”

And then Jesus would’ve told him, “But Zacchaeus, if you would acknowledge who you are and what you are and look to Me, then you’ll become a new man. And as a result of becoming a new man on the inside, you’ll live a new life on the outside.” And then Jesus announces to the crowd, “Today salvation has come to this house.”

Has Jesus ever stood outside your door and made such an announcement? Don’t tell me it’s because you don’t need salvation. And why not allow today to be the day? Let’s pray:

Gracious God, we thank you for Your Word. It’s such a wonderful thing. It shines out into the darkness of our days with such clarity and purity. It pierces to the very quick of our being and shows us our need of You, and then brings this wonderful news: that upon a life we didn’t live, upon a death we didn’t die, upon Jesus’ life and death we may stake our whole eternity.

Some of us, this morning, are painfully aware of the theft in which we’ve been involved, and we want to recognize it; we want to repent of it; we want, as we’re enabled, to make restitution for it. So, we pray for Your grace, that we might be granted faith, that we might cast ourselves upon Your mercy, that You may announce for some of us, “Today, salvation has come to this house.”