Bandits, Beware! - Part A

The commandment itself implies when it says you shall not steal. It implies that somebody's going to own something in order to have it stolen. So it implies that private property is rightful. It's okay to own something. Now socialism would say that everything belongs to the state. Capitalism would say everything belongs to the individual.

I think both of those are wrong. People would say it all belongs to God. If you saw Doris Payne walking along the street, you'd probably think she was a nice elderly grandmother. She's known for being well put together, well traveled, and very charming. But if you mentioned her name to Interpol, you'd be shocked to learn the charmer is one of the most notorious jewelry thieves around, with an international career of stealing fine jewelry around the world reaching back five decades. The one that commands us not to steal as he continues our current teaching series, God's Top Ten. This series is a dynamic and current look at the Ten Commandments.

And while most of us don't have a career as thieves, we've all been affected in some way by stealing. We'll see what God's Word has to say about that here in just a moment. But right now, this month's special resource is in high demand. So here's more. But in all of history, one biography stands out above the rest. I'm excited to announce the release of my new book, The Biography of God, which gives an in-depth look at God's character and nature, diving into the theological and personal profile of our Heavenly Father. I invite you on a journey to search the Scriptures to discover who God is and how sensitive He is to the human condition. This process will both lift you up and humble you. Here's how to get your copy of my newest book, The Biography of God.

Verse 15, and join Skip Hitek. He had a nicely wrapped gift. He opened it up, and it was the club.

Are you familiar with that? The club is that device that attaches to the steering wheel of a car to dissuade any would-be thieves from ripping it off. He saw it and was so excited. Thank you, honey, for being so thoughtful. You knew that I was excited about this car. So, club in hand, husband and wife went out from the house into the driveway where their brand new car had been stolen while they were in the house. True story. How sad.

What a feeling of vulnerability and despair. And if you've ever had anything ripped off, you know that feeling. In fact, show of hands, how many here have had anything stolen from you? Raise your hands up.

Look around. That's like all of us. I've never had a car stolen, but I had a bicycle stolen, among other things. Once I pulled into my, after Sunday service, into my garage, kept the garage door open, five minutes. I went upstairs just to change clothes, come back down. In that length of time, somebody had been watching and stole my mountain bike. That happened to me twice in the same house.

But it's not as bad as my next-door neighbor. My next-door neighbor and his wife went out for a weekend. A moving truck pulled into their driveway, unloaded everything in the house into the truck and drove away. Now, I saw the moving truck, but I thought somebody was moving in. I didn't know that somebody was ripping off those who had already moved in.

I mean, it looked like a regular moving truck. They stole everything. I know you're thinking, I don't want to live in your neighborhood. There has been problems with thievery, stealing, ever since the beginning of humanity. Hence the need for the commandment, you shall not steal.

I even got an article last night, somebody emailed it to me. Somebody in Singapore stole a Bible from a bookstore, and the judge sentenced him to four months in prison. The judge was quoting the Bible to him and said, young man, I suggest that the next four months in prison, you read that Bible. In fact, he marked it, page 60, you'll find the words, you shall not steal. But we discover, as I mentioned, from the beginning of time, people have had problems with this. Archaeologists have discovered watchtowers in the ancient fields, a place where somebody would be keeping watch over crops, over animals, over houses, to keep watch over property, lest a thief would come in and steal it. Another ancient way of thievery was moving boundary lines. Usually boundary lines were marked off by rocks. So what people would do, and it was a law in the Old Testament against it, but they would move their boundary line ever so slightly. Get up in the middle of the night, move that rock just an inch or two into your neighbor's property. And then in a few weeks, you'd move it another inch or two.

Well, over time, you can acquire a lot of property. I even heard a story, don't know how true it is, but I heard it. A guy walks into a convenience store, comes up behind somebody wanting to buy something, and he sticks, pokes something in his back, and the thief says, stick him down. And the victim says, what? I think it's supposed to be stick him up. And the thief said, oh, that's how it goes. No wonder I haven't made any money at this thing. Well, it was Martin Luther who in his day said, only a small percentage of thieves are actually hung.

If we were to hang all thieves, where would we find enough rope? You say, but Skip, what does that have to do with us as God's people, as Christian people? Aren't Christians the most pure, the most honest in all the world?

Well, some think so. There's a sociologist from Princeton University by the name of Robert Wuthnow who has studied this. He studied people's ethics based upon their belief system. And he believes this is true. He noted that there's less stealing, cheating, and tardiness and bending of the rules among those who attend church at least once a week. Those involved in evangelical fellowships demonstrate an even higher ethical standard in the workplace. You say, that's great news. That's the way it ought to be.

Not so fast. Not everybody agrees with Robert Wuthnow. George Gallup, for example, and his famous Gallup Poll organization has also studied Americans and religious Americans. And he studied things like people reporting on their income tax or expense accounts.

And he noted there's a large percentage of Americans that don't think cheating on their income tax or expense reports is stealing. And he said, and I quote, professions of faith are not often followed by ethical performance. So, who's right?

Robert Wuthnow or George Gallup? Answer, it doesn't matter. What matters today is about you and me. How we fare under this commandment. Well, the commandment, as I said, is simply stated, verse 15, is only four words. An easy text to make it true in one Sunday.

You shall not steal. Four English words. In Hebrew, it's even simpler.

Two words. A translation from Hebrew would simply be steal not. You can't get any simpler than that. But what I'd like to do is unpack this commandment. First of all, we notice this commandment is a primary commandment.

Let me explain what I mean. It's not just the Bible where we find this command. It's not just in the Judeo-Christian heritage where we find you shall not steal. It seems to be a value highly held in virtually every culture, every civilization.

It seems to be a generally accepted standard of the human race. Not so with some of the other commandments. For instance, the first one, I am the Lord your God.

You will have no other gods besides me, Yahweh. Not every culture holds to that. Or the second commandment, you will make no graven image when you worship me. Not every culture values that. But this one, it seems, is different. It's primary.

It's basic. And just about every civilization would agree, this is good. Don't rip people off. So you could go back to ancient Egypt or ancient Babylon, the famous code of Hammurabi, which shows all of the ancient laws of that culture, and you find that this commandment is mentioned. Now in the Old Testament, which we're in, Exodus 20, the principle is stated in verse 15.

The practice of the principle is outlined in chapter 22 of Exodus. And it would seem, as I've gone through that chapter and others, that God in the Old Testament wants the victim to be compensated and the criminal to be punished, not vice versa. Compensated.

So, for instance, if in the Old Testament you were to steal something, you know what you do? You pay it back and add 20%. Compensation. If you steal an animal, you pay it back double. So if you steal one, you pay back two. If you steal four, you pay back eight.

Compensation. If you steal an animal and you kill that animal or sell the animal, you pay it back four or five fold. It can get pretty expensive to be a thief. And if you steal a human being, we'd call it kidnapping.

The punishment is the death penalty. On the news not long ago, there was a girl who was caught. She was trying to figure out a way to get people's money, steal couples' money, by pretending to have them adopt her baby. She had recently had a baby. She'd bring her baby in. They'd fill out forms.

She would take a down payment of some kind and go on to the next couple, using her baby to steal people's money. Now, a note about the Old Testament. There was no prison system back then.

Interesting. It was all about restitution. You know, today people go to prison and sit under the experts in prison and figure out how to do it better, and they get out and they're even more refined, in some cases, in their crime.

No, back then, it's you work it off, man. You pay it back. There's going to be restitution and compensation. When we move to the Roman culture, the Greco-Roman culture, we discover that they also looked dimly upon thieves, and more stringently did they punish the thief.

It's not that they had to pay back. If you were caught in the act of stealing, you would be publicly flogged, or worse. Remember who was dying next to Jesus Christ on the cross in the Roman era? Two thieves, Mark tells us, being put to death for their crime of thievery and insurrection.

Now, in our culture, the American culture, where there's the new victim mentality, this is a huge problem. Right before second service today, somebody came in and she said, what commandment are you covering today? I said, you shall not steal. She said, good, because I just got broken into last evening, my car right out front. Somebody threw a brick through my brand new car. Didn't steal the car, but broke into it and stole things from it. It's a big problem.

I did a little research. I went online and I found one online legal source that said shoplifters cost US businesses approximately $16 billion a year. 16, that's not chump change, $16 billion a year from shoplifting. The same legal source estimates one out of every three new businesses will close, fold, and end due to shoplifting. You say shoplifting?

Who's shoplifting? It must be the very poor, right? They need to survive.

They have to do that to stay alive. Not so. One Washington source said 70% of all shoplifters are in the middle income bracket. 20% are in the upper income bracket. They're rich. Only 10% of the shoplifters that are caught fall into the low income bracket. Then there's hotel theft.

500 million a year. Some hotels say that one out of every three guests in a hotel steal something. A towel, a robe, a refrigerator. I don't know what they steal. One out of every three guests steal something. There's even an ad in a classified column in a university medical journal reading, will the person who stole the jar of alcohol from room 303 kindly return my uncle's appendix? No questions asked. That's desperate.

What would you do with an appendix anyway? A few years ago, there was a strike in New York City, a garbage strike, garbage collector strike. And in a big city, when you have a garbage collector strike, it's bad.

It gets stinky really quickly. So the garbage collectors, the sanitation engineers weren't picking up the garbage. One New Yorker had an ingenious way of getting rid of his garbage. Every night he'd wrap it up and place it in a box and put it on the front seat of his car. Every day it was gone. It got stolen. That's how he got rid of his garbage.

That's pretty smart. This guy knew human nature, didn't he? He'd wrap it up and the guy would say, I'm taking that.

He'd take it home and he'd open it up. It's just garbage. God, I love that. It's a primary commandment. Something else about this commandment as we unpack it, it's a presumptive commandment. You see, the commandment itself implies, when it says you shall not steal, it implies that somebody's going to own something in order to have it stolen. So it implies that private property is rightful.

It's okay to own something. Now, socialism would say that everything belongs to the state. Capitalism would say everything belongs to the individual.

I think both of those are wrong. The Bible would say it all belongs to God. Psalm 24 says, the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. So here's how it works. God owns everything but has made you and I stewards of some things. Stewards of it.

Managers of it. I bring this up because every now and then you'll run into well-meaning, very zealous Christians who say, well, if you're truly a spiritual Christian, you'll sell everything and you pool your resources in a communal, communistic, socialistic kind of a way. Like the early church, they'll point out. Like Ananias and Sapphira and others who sold property and laid the money at the apostles' feet.

That, they say, is true spirituality. That's New Testament. Well, first of all, it was never enforced in the New Testament.

It was always voluntary. It was never a commandment. It was done by necessity because the people, the church in the New Testament, they were losing their jobs. The Sadducees were firing all the people that worked for the temple because of their new messianic beliefs. So by need, they had to sell things and pool their money together. Now, the Bible would endorse private ownership, or should we say private stewardship.

And here's why. It's so that as you look at what God has entrusted to you and I and seeing others who have a need, we could be instruments to meet that need. You know, God sees hard work as honorable. So as you continue your busy day, we should give thanks for jobs and chores that keep our hands busy, shouldn't we? You just heard part one of a teaching titled Bandits Beware, and tomorrow we'll continue the second half of this teaching. This is Connect with Skip Weekend Edition, and thank you for joining in today. Skip and Lendya have some more things they'd like to share with us today, but first I want to let you know more about our current teaching series, God's Top Ten. A dynamic look at the Ten Commandments, and as Skip unpacks them, he helps us grasp not only why they were important when God originally gave them, but why they're relevant today.

We'll have ordering information for you in just a moment, but first let's go in studio with Skip and his wife, Lendya. All right, this stealing topic is very tricky nowadays, because we have the introduction of some gray areas, I'll say, like technology and digital media. Is it stealing to copy someone else's MP3 file or download a song or a movie or go to a website and kind of be on the stealth?

We forget about some of the ways that we really could be stealing. Yeah, you know, this whole thing came up years ago with a website, I think it was Napster, and stuff could be mass produced and downloaded, and artists started finding that people were listening and taking their songs, and they weren't getting any remuneration for it. Now, you know me, I love vinyl. I buy records still. So I believe in rewarding artists for their work and their art, and I buy the album, and the album has the CD in it or a download that I can go and get on iTunes and download it as well. But I pay the price for it, and so I don't believe in ripping music off.

I think we need to be fair and square, and the workman is worthy of his wage. Well, and we have friends who are artists as well. We have a lot of friends who are musicians, and so we can sympathize. It's not an easy life, and they do count on all those ways of bringing in some revenue. You know, and maybe there's some workplace things.

I know back in the day I worked at this radio station, not this one here, one in town, and I had put a couple of stamps on, some letters that I mailed personally, and I think I took home a couple pens or maybe a pad of paper. And one day in my quiet time, the Lord said, You're stealing. And I was just, you know, aghast.

Like, I would never, you know, walk in and stick something under my shirt and take it out of a store. But he convicted me that that was really, in essence, stealing. And so he told me I not only needed to confess, but, you know, give back to work, whatever would be the, you know, honorable amount. And so I went in and told my boss that I was a thief.

I think he almost fell over, because then when I explained it with stamps and pencils, and it was like, Oh, my goodness. But I think it's really great that we keep a very close relationship with the Lord, so that he can show us even those small details when it comes to this topic. You know, one of the biggest areas of thievery is time.

And a study was done, I read it recently, where in the workplace, people admitted, and they did several layers of surveying, but people basically admitted to wasting enough time to equal one whole day of a five-day workweek, whether it's taking a longer break or a longer lunch or just doing whatever they want to do. But that's 20 percent of the boss's time. And, you know, I really believe we need to honor the Lord with our time to be a witness. And maybe it's easier in Christian organizations, I don't know, because you think, Oh, everybody's a believer, they'll just forgive me and love me. But especially it's the Lord's time, and you want to honor him and honor his name. Well, thanks, Skip and Lydia.

And remember, you can get your copy of the entire God's Top Ten series as an audio CD package for only $39 plus shipping when you order today at connectwithskip.com or call 1-800-922-1888. God has made us stewards of all we possess, so what does that look like practically? We'll talk about that more next time here in Connect with Skip Weekend Edition, a presentation of Connection Communications. Make a connection. Make a connection at the foot of the crossing.

Cast all burdens on his word. Make a connection. A connection. A connection. Connecting you to God's never changing truth in ever-changing times.