“PROPERTY CRIME: ANCIENT AND HIGH-TECH”
Exodus 22:1-17
Enron economics: You have 2 cows. You sell 3 of them to your publicly listed company, then execute a debt/equity swap so that you get all 4 cows back, with a tax exemption for 5 cows. The milk rights of the 6 cows are transferred to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the rights to all 7 cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns 8 cows, with an option on 1 more.
We’ve come a long way since the days of garden-variety burglary, shoplifting, cattle-rustling, and bank robbery. Today, we’ve progressed to high-tech embezzlement and identity theft. (Identity theft is reported to strike 15 million victims a year and cost us $50 billion.) We have also evolved ways to steal on a scale undreamed-of by our ancestors. We’ve even figured out how to pass laws to steal from whole classes of people, even from our great-grandchildren.
As we compare the Law of Moses to other ancient law codes, we find that the Bible does the reverse of other laws on how it handles property crime. A thief was originally killed in Babylon. This was later changed to a penalty of 30-fold restitution for stealing the property of God or king, and 10-fold restitution if it was a private citizen, with death as the penalty if you couldn’t pay. Notice how humane the Bible is by comparison. The penalty for theft is entirely in the pocketbook: 4-fold or 5-fold if you no longer had the loot, double if you did, slavery if you couldn’t pay, enough to discourage theft. The only property crime where God decrees a death penalty is sacred loot taken during holy war.
God gets much less bent-out-of-shape about property crime than about other moral issues. Most laws in the Western world are lenient on sex, but they throw the book at property crime. The Bible does the reverse.
But the other side of the coin is that God still does care about property rights. Yes, the early church held all their goods in common. Don’t get the wrong impression! All we have belongs to God, so we must not get possessive about it. God gives to us, to see how well we will respect what God has given to others, and to see how generously we will share what God has given to us. It’s a test. Failing to properly respect what God has given to others by taking what does not rightly belong to us is an offense against God. God wants us to redistribute, not the treasure that God has given to others, but our own. God wants us to learn not to be possessive with what he has given us, but God forbids us to run roughshod over the rights of the individual.
The other issue that we see God cares about in the area of theft is restitution. It is an issue that seems to get ignored in modern criminal justice. To have true justice, the thief must be required to pay back the victim, to compensate their loss.
The issue of embezzlement is addressed here in the laws dealing with property that has been entrusted to someone else and then it disappears. We also have cases where an item turns up in someone’s possession and a dispute arises as to whether it was lost or stolen, and to which person does the item belong. Here, both parties are to appear before ha-elohim, which means either “the judges” or “God.” In verse 14, a similar property dispute is settled by taking an oath before “the Lord” (no dispute as to who that means). When such disputes are brought before God, they are settled either by the use of the Urim and Thummim (the sacred lots, which give an either/or decision), or by the taking of an oath. As we read ancient court records, we see that cases are often won or lost because one party was afraid to swear to God, because they feared the curse on those who lied under oath. We’ll talk about truth and justice later on in this series.
The very last piece of case law in the Book of the Covenant is the case of the seduced virgin, which seems to be classified as a case of property violation. A virgin daughter was an asset to the family. In such a case, the man had the responsibility to either marry the girl or to compensate her family for taking what he had no right to take. For us, this is not a property issue. Paul urges believers not to defraud one another by sex outside of marriage (1 Thess 4:6). When we fail to play by God’s book, we cheat both our future spouse and ourselves of God’s maximum joy. It’s like the owner’s manual on our computer says: Don’t spill liquids on your keyboard – it’s not good for the computer.
Elsewhere in the Law of Moses, God condemns fraudulent weights and measures. Deuteronomy 25:13-16 says, “You shall not have in your bag two sets of weights, a large and a small. You shall not have in your house two sets of bushels, a large and a small. (Only) a full and honest weight you shall have; (only) a full and honest bushel you shall have.” It says all those who cheat like this “are an abomination to YHWH your God.”
Leviticus 19:35-36 says, “You shall not do wickedness in judgment, in dry measure, in weight, or in liquid measure. You shall have honest scales, honest weights, an honest ephah (bushel), and an honest hin (liquid measure).” The prophet Amos cries out against those who “make the bushel small and the shekel great” (Amos 8:5).
In a low-tech age, it was easy to conceal and hard to detect the difference between a full 11-gram shekel and a 10-gram shekel, or a 40-liter ephah and a 39.6-liter ephah. Today, technology has made such crude methods of theft almost obsolete, although we still hear of companies who “cook the books” or who keep two sets of safety records (one for OSHA and one for their own private use).
I propose that government accounting is a far more grievous form of double-dealing false measuring techniques. Routinely, politicians tell us about supposed budget cuts. The truth is that spending is almost never actually rolled back. Budget increases are automatic, and are written into the fiction of what is called a “cut.”
If government spending were to be frozen today, it would be reported as a $9 trillion “cut” over 10 years, even though spending would remain the same. When some folks proposed back in the 1990’s to slow down increases in spending from 7% to 3% (I don’t remember the exact figures), we were told they were trying to put Grandma on dog food. To claim that an increase is a “cut” is a false measuring technique that has put the public into hock for trillions of dollars.
Our nation alone has accumulated $117 trillion worth of unfunded liabilities. We’ve made $117 trillion worth of promises we can’t pay, which is theft just as sure as piling up a tab at a restaurant and walking out without paying. Any civilization is doomed as soon as a majority figures out they can vote themselves a windfall out of the public treasury, like ancient Rome did.
What can we do about it? Someone said recently there’s 3 ways to seize the wealth of the middle class: taxation, inflation, and default. Printing more money is a theft from everyone’s pocket, driving up prices and driving down the value of our currency. It’s like mixing copper into pure gold or silver. God says in Isaiah 1:22 that in Jerusalem, “Your silver has become dross, your wine mixed with water.” Printing more money now has a fancy name: Quantitative Easing (that’s what QE 2 and QE 3 stands for). Probably only God’s mercy has kept this practice from turning into runaway inflation.
Theft can be defined as taking someone’s goods or services for less than they’re worth, or selling them for more than they’re worth, without the other party’s knowledge or consent. The Occupy movement claims that the richest 1% got their money by stealing from the rest of us. And yet some of those same protesters expect free I-pads and free health care and free education, and they expect someone else to pay for it. We see ads on TV: “Get this medical gizmo, and make everyone else pay for it, even if you’re taking away money that was meant for someone’s health care 20 years from now.” Theft comes partly from a warped view of what belongs to us. We envy the rich and think, “I deserve my share of what they have,” so we try to pass laws to take it away by force.
God has not spelled out in Scripture exactly what a fair wage or fair price is, partly because those amounts will vary due to all sorts of different factors like time, place, and other market conditions. However, we know that God is a God of justice, and our God cares passionately when people are being ripped off, whether it be business or labor, rich or poor, who’s getting ripped off.
All that we have belongs to God. God gives to each of us, and God expects us to keep our hands off of what God has given our neighbor, and to share what God has given to us. God knows that whenever we grab for what does not belong to us, we are finding fault with God. It’s not easy being content with what we have. Our hearts are always craving more. We have a God-shaped vacuum in our hearts that only Christ can fill.
Remember what we learned about property crime in this passage? We saw that God cares less about property than about more important issues in life. Jesus says, “Life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” (Lk 12:15) When we stand before God on the last day, God’s not going to say, “Did you have a nice house on earth? Did you have a good job? Did you make lots of money? Good! That was what was really important in life!” Nope! What will be all-important is the question: Did you have a saving relationship with Jesus Christ? If we miss Jesus, we miss out on what life was all about. Jesus came to restore our broken relationship with God, to reconnect us with God, so that we can have life that is full to overflowing, the way that God intended it. If you’ve never done so before, ask Jesus to come into your life and put you right with God.
