The teacher said to the little boy who had stolen an apple
from another boy's lunch pail, "Don't you know that you
broke the eighth commandment?" "Yes," he responded,
"But I figured I might just as well have the apple and break
the eighth commandment as covet it and break the tenth."
The truth that is immediate evident in this incident is that
the human ability to rationalize about sin, and even use the
Scripture to support it, is unusually keen. A mother caught
her little girl in the cookie jar after she had been forbidden
to take any. The mother said as she caught her in the act of
petty thief, "What commandment is being broken here?"
The little girl said, "Suffer little children to come unto me
and forbid them not."
It is this keen ability to rationalize that makes us fearful
of the new morality line on the eighth commandment. We
do not disagree with the principle that the lesser of two evils
is the best choice. If the little boy who stole the apple would
have followed this principle, he would have chosen to be
guilty of coveting rather than stealing. Often we have been
guilty of leading people to sin by teaching that all sins are
equal. A person with this attitude easily yields to temptation.
He figures if he desires to sin, and that is as bad as doing the
sin, then he has nothing to lose by acting out his desire, for
he is already guilty.
It is important that we give our youth protection against
this kind of reasoning. There are degrees and various levels
of offense. Some are punished by death, while others require
only fines or restitution, and still others are resolved through
repentance. A sin such as coveting remains a matter
between you and God, and it can be forgiven by confusing,
but to act on the coveting, and steal, becomes a crime against
man. This calls for a settlement on that level, plus
repentance before God, and it can involve imprisonment as
well as restitution. All sins make you a sinner, but only some
sins make you a criminal. All violations of the Ten
Commandments are not equal. There is such a thing as a
lesser of two evils.
If a man is going to shoot his neighbor, and I know it, and
steal his gun, I turn stealing into a virtue, for I preserve life
in obedience to the sixth commandment, and I prevent an
unjust killing. If a busload of school children is stalled on a
track, and a train is coming, there are many ways in which I
might steal, or be destructive to the property of others in
order to stop the approaching train. It could be as minor as
taking a sheet from a nearby wash line, and running down
the track waving it. I could be as radical as taking
someone's car and stopping it on the track to halt the train
before it hit the bus. In any case, you would be a hero, and
what ever you did would be considered a virtue rather than
a vice.
The problem comes when people pervert this reality. For
example, what of the man who stole from his neighbor
because he loved him? Love is the absolute he argues, and
so he reasons that his neighbor is becoming too materialistic.
So, in true love for him he decides to remove the false
foundation of materialism that he is resting on. He begins to
steal his possessions in the hope that his neighbor will began
to seek a more spiritual foundation for his life. Such is the
power of rationalization.
The logic of the new morality has hit our nation at a time
when it is least needed. Stealing has already been so
minimized as a serious moral offense that it is fast becoming
the All-American sport. Everyone is playing the game. In a
article titled, Stealing Their Way Through College, it is
brought out that the major problem of the National
Association Of College Stores is the problem of shrinkage.
They haven't determined if the motive is love or not, but
students from every kind of college and university are
relieving them of millions of dollars worth of merchandise
without paying for it. I once counseled with a girl in a
Christian college who stole several hundred dollars worth of
clothing and cosmetics in one semester.
In one large Ivy League University the bookstore loses
$90,000 a year to student heisters. The worse case was that
of a divinity school graduate student caught lifting a Bible.
If he would have gotten by with it, he might have considered
it an answer to prayer. This is just how weak the American
conscious is on the matter of stealing. Youth is on a shop
lifting spree, but the facts indicate they are only following
the example established by adults. It is fantastic the amount
to stealing adults do. In Luther's day he said, "Only a small
portion of thieves are hanged. If all were hanged where
would we get rope enough?" In our day, the statistics
indicate we would also run out of trees on which to hang
people. It is so universal that almost everyone is guilty in
some degree.
S. J. Curtis, a professional security consultant, says there
are more than 150,000 shopliftings a week, costing store
owners billions annually. A report in the Chicago Tribune
Magazine said that 90% of this is done by housewives, and
1/4 of it is done in the Christmas season. Stealing has
become a part of the American way of life to millions of
average citizens. It use to be that when an officer
apprehended a youth in the act of thief, he would burst into
tears. This day is gone, and now the typical response is one
of arrogance and defiance, as if they had a right to engage in
thievery unhindered. So low is the level of respect for the
property of others that even the police have decided to play
what's yours is mine. Police scandals are not uncommon,
and where insurance is involved even the robbed join the
game.
Ralph Smith, in the book The Tarnished Badge, tells of
how policeman who burglarized stores were rewarded by the
owner. One owner, not knowing the investigating officer
was the one who robbed said, "Here, take this radio home to
your wife, it's insured, and I'll simply include it in the thief
list." Even if the policeman had not been the original thief,
both he and owner were thieves in robbing the insurance
company.
Christians get caught up in stealing, and hardly even
know it. They feel free to steal music and literary material
that is copyrighted. Employees steal over three billion a year
from their employers. Fifteen percent of our cost for most
everything is due to the need to regain the losses from
stealing. Seventy percent of inventory loses are by
employees, and only fifteen percent by shoplifting. It is an
inside job. It is so easy and so popular. Studies show that
when the top management people are honest, the employees
are too. But if these top people are not honest, it is
contagious, and will spread to all below them. The rich are
into it too. I read of a highly respected woman who fired her
maid because she was caught stealing her Waldorf-Astoria,
and Conrad Hilton towels. Believe it or not, 500,000 grocery
carts disappear from supermarkets every year.
Time does not permit us to consider the endless ways by
which people steal. The reason very few sermons are
preached on this commandment is that when you get
through examining all of the ways it is violated, practically
everyone is guilty and stands condemned. Robert Kahn, the
Jewish author writes, "Not one of the Ten Commandments
is so frequently broken, bent, skirted, evaded, sidestepped,
or ignored. There are hundreds of ways to steal.... The
dictionary contains dozens and dozens of nouns, adjectives,
and verbs that have to do with dishonest dealing with
property. You can steal by burglary, by larceny, by
embezzlement. You can steal by robbery, by highjacking, by
shoplifting, by picking pockets, by plagiarizing. You can
gyp, lift, loot, nip, pinch, pluck, pilfer, snitch, snatch, and
swindle."
Really, all of the commandments are dealing with some
form of stealing. If you do not keep the first, you rob God of
His right to first place in your life. If you do not keep the
fourth you rob yourself of God's blessing of rest. If you do
not keep the fifth you rob mom and dad of the honor do
them. If you break the sixth you rob men of life. If you
break the seventh you rob your mate of a happy marriage.
If you break the ninth you rob men of their reputation.
Almost all sin is some form of stealing in which you rob God,
your neighbor, or yourself of some great value. If you think
you are not a thief, it is because you have thought in too
narrow a range about this commandment.
You may not steal your neighbor's property, but you may
still be a thief of his time. If you waste people's time when
they prefer to get on with other obligations, you are stealing
a part of their life. There are people who are committing
murder on the installment plan by stealing a chunk of other
people's lives almost daily. If it is mutually acceptable there
is no problem, but if you take a person's time, and they do
not will to give it, it is stealing. If you do not pay a man for
service performed in a reasonable time, it is robbery. The
Old Testament demanded that a laborer be paid the very
day he worked. To withhold it was considered a serious sin.
History is filled with businesses who have gone bankrupted
because customers did not pay for their service or product.
It is a wide spread form of stealing.
The paradox is, this is the one commandment that has
almost universal acceptance. All peoples condemn stealing
in principle. Even a thief hates to be robbed. Why then is it
so prevalent in practice? Because of ignorance about the
nature of property, which leads to a loss of respect for
property. When there is a loss of respect for life, murder
increases. When there is a loss of respect for marriage
adultery increases. When there is a loss of respect for
property stealing increases. Force is futile, and will never
solve the problem. Men will only cease to steal when they
come to understand, respect, and obey the principle behind
the eighth commandment. That principle is, the
preservation of property, or the right of ownership.
Someone said that stealing is of the devil because
property is of God. It would take hours just to read all of
the passages in the Bible that deal with God's concern for
the rights of all men to own property. The whole economic
system of Israel was set up to make sure no one could get a
monopoly and deprive others of their ownership of land.
Land was distributed to all the tribes according to their
number, so each family got a share. There would always be
those who failed and went into debt to others, but every
50thyear was a year of Jubilee, and all land was to be returned to
its original owners so that no family would ever be
permanently dispossessed. This was an ideal, and was often
violated, but we see what God intended. Every man was to
have property he could call his own, for only then could he
be a good steward of what God had given him. Any society
that deprives people of their right to own property denies
them of the God given right to be God's stewards.
In the New Testament we find that the followers of Jesus
were often property owners. Mary and Martha and Lazarus
had a lovely home where Jesus enjoyed staying. Mary
sacrificed an expensive jar of perfume to anoint Jesus. It
was her own to do with as she chose. The early churches
began in the homes of the more wealthy disciples. Without
the property holders in the early church there would have
been great handicaps, but they were there, and gave their
possessions to build the church. The success of the church
has always depended upon the right of Christians to own
property, and to devote that property for the extension of
God's kingdom on earth.
In the 14th century the Catholic Church tended to feel
that non-believers had no right to private property. One
author wrote, "He who is not subject to God, justly loses and
unjustly possesses all that he has from God." This lead to
the church taking the property of unbelievers. The same
thing happened in the Spanish Inquisition. The church
became wealthy by theft. Since the church controlled the
government, it was legal theft. The official Catholic position,
however, is that private ownership is a universal right. Saint
Thomas Aquinus, their master theologian, said, "Unbelief in
itself is not incompatible with the right to own and to
rule...." Pope Leo the 13th in 1891 said, "Every man has the
right by nature to possess property as his own."
This has always been the Protestant position, assuming
that the property was gained in an acceptable manner. No
man has the right to retain what he has gained by theft.
Legitimate ownership is to be respected by all men however.
This principle was so basic to a sound society that God
demanded of the Jews that they even respect the property of
their enemy. In Ex. 23:4-5 we read, "If you meet your
enemies ox or ass going astray, you shall bring it back to
him. If you see the ass of one who hates you lying under its
burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it, you shall
help him to lift it up." Respect for property was so
important that God judged all of Israel, and condemned to
death a whole family, because Achan stole from an enemy on
the battlefield. The preservation of property is important to
God because it is important for the good of man.
In the Old Testament every farmer had an obligation to
leave the corners of his field unharvested. This was his
contribution to the welfare system for the poor of his day.
The Christian steward is to acknowledge God as the rightful
owner of all his possessions, and seek to use them in a way
that pleases God. If the right to own is not God given, but a
man made right, then man can also deprive men of this
right. This is the philosophy of Communism. Stealing is
wrong because ownership is right, and ownership is right
because God has ordained it. Obedience to the eighth
commandment, like all of the rest, is essential to the good
life, and the good society. The most patriotic thing
Christians can do is to live by the principles of the Ten
Commandments.
As Christians, we know we are not saved by the Ten
Commandments, but by personal trust in Jesus Christ as our
Savior. Yet we dare not overlook the fact that a corporate
salvation, in terms of being saved from the loss of our
national blessings and freedoms, depends upon the moral
character of the people. Had there been ten righteous men
in Sodom, it would have escaped the wrath of God. Let us
never underestimate the importance of any man's obedience
to the Ten Commandments. Everyone counts, and so let us
pray that we will be the salt of the earth, and avoid the many
ways of stealing. Bernard Shaw said, "A gentlemen is one
who puts more into life than he takes out of it. Otherwise he
is a thief." May God help us to be as concerned as God is
for the preservation of property.
