All right, so we are continuing our series on covenant life together. We're on lesson number four. And for the next two Sunday evenings, I would like to talk about paragraph two. And so I'd like to draw your attention to our membership covenant. This is actually the second part of paragraph two in our membership covenant. So if you have it, great. If not, you can just listen along, but this is what our membership covenant says. It says we commit to contributing cheerfully and regularly for the ministry and expenses of the church, the relief of the poor and the spread of the gospel to the world. Now, whenever you talk about money just in regular life, there's all kinds of complications that are attached to it. People don't like to talk about money. People don't like to let go of money. People don't like to compare incomes with others. People don't like to talk about taxes, death, and all the rest. But when you think about money within the context of the church, there's a different set of challenges, different set of complications that are raised. There's a different set of questions that are raised. And so what I'd like to do over the next two weeks is I decided to break this lesson up or this phrase in the membership covenant into two parts because there's a lot of misunderstanding with respect to giving in the context of the church. And so I thought in the first lesson, what I'd like to do is give a biblical theological analysis of giving in the Bible, try to connect the two testaments because that's the real challenge and we'll come back to that in a second. And then next week, once we get that principle distilled from biblical theology, what a new covenant Christian is to give, then we can talk about the principles for giving that it is proportionate. It is sacrificial. It is generous, et cetera, et cetera. So that's what we want to do. But before I begin, I would just like to talk about two major challenges that we have to overcome when it comes to money, two major challenges. And the first one is this. Greed and selfishness in our own heart. I think that when we, especially as 21st century Western wealthy Americans, stop and start thinking about money and giving it to the Lord, we need to recognize the lesson that we should all learn from the rich young ruler. So the rich young ruler comes to Jesus and he says, What do I need to do to inherit the kingdom of God? And you know, the story Jesus tells him, keep all these commands. And he says, Oh, I've kept all these since my youth. And Jesus looked at him and smiled. I think it was a wry grin. I the text says that he loved him. I think he loved him. And yet he recognized his naivete. And then what did he tell him? He said, Go and sell all that you have. Give it to the poor and follow me. And what did the rich young ruler do? He walked away disheartened because he had many possessions. Then what did Jesus say? He says it is easier. He says, Children, how difficult is it to enter the kingdom of God? It's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. And maybe you don't think of yourself as rich. I know I certainly don't think of myself as rich, but if you actually compare yourself to the income of the rest of the nations and the rest of the world, the fact of the matter is you're in the top 15, maybe even 10% of the whole world. you make the top income in the 10% of the rest of the world. And so there's many respects in which we are rich comparatively, but even if we're poor, we can be a greedy miser, can't we? Even if we're poor, we can hold on to those two coins and rub them together and think in a Gollum-esque type way, my precious, my precious, and be unwilling to let go of them, unlike the widow who gave it all and was commended by Jesus because she gave more than everybody there proportionally. So I think the first thing we need to recognize before we even start a discussion on money is that there is greed within our hearts that we need to do business with. We need to recognize first and foremost that everything that we have is the Lord's, and as I said in my prayer, besides that which you put in the offering plate, even what we keep, whether that's 90%, 80%, 60%, 95%, whatever the case may be, we are still stewards over that percentage. We are still called to glorify God in how we use that money and how we don't get into debt, how we invest wisely for the future, how we do buy things that are profitable and helpful and needful and not buy things that are wasteful. All of it is the Lord's. The first thing we need to deal with is the greed and selfishness within our own hearts. But now here's the second thing that we're going to spend the rest of our time on tonight. Putting the two testaments together. So many of you know that John Calvin had a burden in his heart, which we share. And that burden was to show that though the Bible has two testaments, Old Testament and New Testament, it was one religion. And he was very forceful in this, in his writings, in trying to ward off the heresies of numerous groups, including Catholic theology. But he tried to show that though there are two testaments, there is still one religion. There is, in other words, continuity between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. But at the same time, There is still what? Discontinuity. There are things that the old covenant people of God practiced and did that they were called to practice and do that we in the new covenant under the new administration of Jesus Christ foretold in the old covenant fulfilled in the new covenant are no longer called to do. And so one of the tasks of what we call biblical theology is try to sort out what commands, what customs, what practices, etc. are for the old covenant people of God and what practices, customs, etc. are for the new covenant people of God. Now there are some things that are black and white, right? Baptism in the Lord's Supper for the new people of covenant of God. It was instituted in the new covenant by Jesus himself. That's cut and dry. But then there's other things that kind of bleed over into both covenants, right? General principles like you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. That's something that both the Israelites and you as a church member of Grace Covenant Church are called to do. So one of the things we need to do, and that's what we're gonna seek to try to do tonight, is to try to figure out how to connect the Testaments with respect to our giving. So when we ask the question, how much do I give to the Lord? That's what I want to talk about tonight, okay? Now let's be a little interactive tonight, okay? With limits. How much do we give the Lord? I see that wry grin that Jesus was exhibiting on some of your faces. How much do we give to the Lord? Go on, it's okay, you may be wrong, but I'll tell you if you are. Okay, good, who said that? Okay, good, everything, that's right. OK, what is the tradition? Let's call it the traditional view that maybe you and I have been brought up with. What percentage of your income? 10 percent. OK. All right. So this is a common answer to the question. How much do we give? We give 10 percent of our income. Here's the next question. Where do we get that? Old Testament. OK. Would anybody say that we get that from the New Testament? OK. All right. Where? Jacob said Abraham. Would anybody want to add to that where we get that in the Old Testament? Huh? It is in Leviticus, that's right. So that's under the Mosaic Law. And Jacob said Abraham. Okay, so here's what we have to do. I can see that you're kind of baffled. Okay, well, maybe I don't know what I think about that, you're thinking, okay? Does the Bible as a whole give us an answer to the question, how much do we give? Well, in the Old Covenant, it certainly does, doesn't it? It certainly gives some quotas or some percentages in the Old Covenant, but here's the thing. Whenever you are undergoing the task of biblical theology, trying to put the two covenants together and figure out what remains in the old covenant and passes away and what continues in the new covenant and is, listen, normative for the people of God today. Incorporate that word into your vocabulary, normative. What would be the opposite of normative? Huh? Temporal? Okay, so there were temporal things. What was something that was temporal associated with old old covenant? Sacrifice was temporal. What else was temporal? Right, all of you are breaking the Mosaic law by wearing more than one fabric tonight. Okay, anybody have pepperoni pizza in the last month? Okay, you broke the Mosaic law. All right, but do you feel guilty? No, because the book of Acts says we're no longer under those things, right? Okay. All right, so We need some hermeneutical principles to distinguish what was temporal from what is now normative. So does everybody understand the distinction between temporal and normative? Everybody got it? All right. We need a hermeneutical principle. What's hermeneutics? The art and science of interpreting the Bible. So a hermeneutic, perhaps you've heard the word a heuristic. a lens through which you look at something and it helps you interpret something. Think of a decoder. You need a hermeneutical decoder that is going to allow you to read the Bible and say, okay, that's for the Jews, not for me, and this is for me and my household, okay? Now, where do we get that decoder? Out of a cereal box? We get it from the New Testament. All right, the New Testament gives us our hermeneutic decoder for reading the Bible and answering these questions, all right? Now, let's take this principle of 10% is what the people of God give today and let's examine it, okay? What's the presupposition of this hermeneutic? The presupposition is what the old covenant people of God did is what I do. Does everybody agree? That's what that principle is. Okay, so we wanna examine that. Well, there's problems with that, right? As we've already said, there's many things that the Old Covenant people of God were commanded to do that we no longer do. We've already mentioned them. Dietary laws, animal sacrifice, clothing laws. So how do we as Christians figure out what is normative for us today? Let me give you three suggestions, okay? Number one, this can be confusing, number one, category one, is two questions. When I'm asking the question, if I come across a command in the Bible, I need to know whether or not it's for me. You ask yourself two questions, okay? And they're in your notes. Question number one. What command, to what covenant is this command attached? To what covenant is this command attached? And then the second question you ask is, am I a party to that covenant? Okay? So, you're reading along your devotions on Monday morning, you know, you're still trying to wake up, coffee's getting going, and you're in Deuteronomy, don't boil a kid in its mother's milk. You guys ever read that one? What does that mean? That means don't boil a baby goat in the milk of its mother. Who would do that? Probably the Canaanites. That's probably why I said don't do it. So you're trying to figure out do I have to do this? Okay, so first question, to what covenant is that command attached? Well, it's clearly attached to the Mosaic covenant. Next question, am I a party to that covenant? No, I'm not part of the old covenant. I'm part of the new covenant. Romans 6, 14, you're not under law, you're under grace. Romans 10, two and three, Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to all those who believe. Galatians chapter three, the law was our? Tutor or schoolmaster in the in the King Jimmy to bring us to Christ and now that we are in Christ We no longer need the law. Okay, so we're not under the law. So I'm no longer a party that covenant now. Here's a caveat Can there be something in the Old Covenant law that continues into the New Covenant? Yes. Good. How do we figure that out? Okay, what in the New Testament is it repeated or affirmed and Is it repeated or affirmed? OK, so Jesus of the Ten Commandments confirms and by the way, expands upon nine of them. OK. He didn't confirm the Sabbath. He confirmed the Sabbath in the Mosaic economy, but then the Mosaic economy came to an end, but he didn't confirm it for the New Covenant era. So we say those nine continue, and there's a sense in which the Lord's Day continues, but we're not talking about that today. There can be a way in which old covenant law continues in the new if it's repeated or affirmed. Now you need to tuck that away and remember that. So that's our first hermeneutical principle. We ask those two diagnostic questions. Secondly, I've already mentioned the second one, a command from the old covenant can be repeated in the new covenant, or it can be normative in the new covenant if it continues. But then the third thing is this, and this is very important, listen. We understand the law is broken down into three divisions. Who knows what they are? Go ahead. Good, good. You get an A+. Civil, ceremonial, and moral, okay? Now, in one sense, all of the law has been fulfilled in Jesus Christ, in that the law as a means for salvation has been fulfilled by Jesus Christ. But now in another conversation in respect of our sanctification, not our justification, but our sanctification, what our holy guide is for living in the new covenant, what division of the law continues to be perpetual. The moral, that's right. Now, here's where the rub comes. The moral law, which we immediately think of the Ten Commandments, continues into the New Covenant, not for justification, but for sanctification. But watch this, and I love this picture. Think of the moral law in the Old Covenant being refracted through the person and work of Christ into the New Covenant, so that however Jesus modifies those laws, that's how they get brought over into the New Covenant. Does that make sense? So Old Covenant, yeah, you can't sleep with somebody that's not your wife. That's right, Jews. And then Jesus comes and says, but if you lust to somebody in your heart, you're committing adultery. He's amped up the requirements, hasn't he? OK, so as those Old Covenant laws are refracted through the person and work of Christ, that's how they come to us in the New Covenant. OK, now here's my question just to get continue to get the and I know this is a thinking session and I know you guys are tired, but try to think with let my people think, OK? When the moral law continues into the New Covenant, here's the question. The civil and the ceremonial have been done away, right? You can eat pepperoni pizza. You can dress like Jacob. All kinds of other things, okay? What part of the law is tithing attached to? Can you find tithing in the moral law? OK, so you can't find tithing in the moral law. And if the moral law is the only thing that continues right from the get go, we have a problem with carrying it over. Now, if you said that the tithing was part of the ceremonial law, you're right. It's actually part of the ceremonial and the civil, which we're going to see in just a moment. OK, so now. I want to take these three principles, these hermeneutical principles, and then apply them now to tithing in the Old Covenant. Now, let me just say before I go any further, this is an incredibly complex issue. There have been literally dissertations written on tithing for the church today. I had to consult a few of them in my studies for this week. So I'm giving a 30,000 feet overview, and there's much more that can be said, but I'm just going to limit my comments to this. Let's just look at tithing in the Old Covenant before the Mosaic law. And I want to give up two. I want to present two examples. You have Abraham and Genesis 14. He defeats the five kings. He defeats the five kings. And then he comes and offers a tithe to whom? Melchizedek, that's right. Author to the Hebrews in Hebrews chapter seven, he picks that back up and he expands upon it. By the way, parenthetical note, in Hebrews chapter seven, the point is not about tithing. The point is about how Jesus is a priest after the order of Melchizedek. So Hebrews seven is not saying, hey, Abraham tithes, so you guys need to do that too. That's not what he's saying, okay? Now what's interesting about this episode in Genesis 14, Number one, there's no law that says you must tithe. You will search in vain before the Mosaic law and find a command from God that says you shall give 10 percent. Now, that being said, it could be that God did command the people of God before Moses to do it, and we just don't have it recorded. That's possible. But we also know that it was the custom of ancient Near Eastern people to give 10% to their tributaries, to their kings, to their suzerains, all right? So that's, I think, what we see Abraham doing. But what's interesting is, does anybody know what he tithed from? what he got from the kings. In the old King Jimmy, the booty, okay, or the spoils, okay? I got to tell a story. I was in my Old Testament survey class as a sophomore in Bible college, and we had a Bible professor. He's no longer there at Master's, but this guy was brilliant. I think he dreamed in Hebrew. But he had glasses this thick, and he kind of had a high, funny voice, and he was lecturing one day on, you know, Genesis and how they took the spoils, but he kept saying booty. And then they got their booty, and then they gave the booty, and there were these kids in the back just snickering the whole time. And it just went over his head. He had no idea what they were snickering at because booty just wasn't in his vernacular. All right, so Abraham, sorry, Abraham tithed from the spoils. Now that's interesting for many reasons. Number one, this was an occasional offering. It wasn't a normative offering. And that's what's key at this point. If we are going to take the example of Abraham and say, Abraham tithed, so we should too. Well, Abraham also was a polygamist. And the Mormons have come along and said, well, you know, the forefathers, they had many wives, so it's okay for us. And what do we say? We say, look, there's a distinction between description and what? Prescription. There's a lot of things that are described in the Bible that doesn't necessarily make them a command. And so here's a hermeneutical principle. When we talk about what our consciences are bound to, we bind them to prescriptions, not descriptions. Okay? So I don't think Abraham, number one, this was an occasional offering. It wasn't a perpetual offering. Number two, it wasn't from his normal income. It was from the spoils. And number three, we need to be very careful about using examples from before the Mosaic law to take normative commands for the people of God. Before the Mosaic law, they also had sacrifices. We don't do that. You could follow the logic. What about Jacob in Genesis 28? He gives 10% to the Lord. Well, if you read that passage, what a lot of people don't understand sometimes is that oftentimes in the Bible, I don't know if I want to say often, but occasionally, authors will tell a story about somebody and some reader, like Christian readers will walk away saying, oh, Samson, he was the good guy. Samson was the bad guy, okay? And if you look carefully at the book of Judges, they craft the narrative in such a way to show you that Samson is the bad guy and an example not to be followed. Well, in this episode in Genesis 28, what does Jacob do before he makes this tithe offering? Does anybody know? He bargains with God. God, if you will be with me, if you will keep me safe, if you will provide for all my needs, if you do all these things, then I'll give you an offering of all that I have. Jacob was known as the conniving guy. He was the deceiver. I hardly think this is an example, again, to be prescriptive for the people of God. And so these two examples really don't demonstrate any normative, prescriptive pattern of conscience obligation for the people of God. Well, let's go now to the Mosaic Law. Now, I'm just going to try to fly by this, but here's the thing. If you look to the Mosaic Law for a prescriptive pattern for giving 10%, you're going to be sorely disappointed, or maybe you'll be relieved, I don't know. If you add up all the tithes that the people of God gave in the Old Testament, does anybody know what the total is? Okay, there's a bunch of different totals. It depends on what scholar you're reading on which day. But I have found in my reading a consensus that it was about 23.3%. There were essentially three different types of ties in the Old Covenant. And before I begin, let me make something very clear, and this is very important, okay? Keep following me, all right? We're almost done, 15 minutes, you can go home and sleep. Have an adult beverage and go to sleep, all right? The old covenant people of God were a theocracy. What is a theocracy? Church and state. So theos, God, krasi, judgment, or rule, a rule by God. Whereas we are a what? Democracy. Well, stop. Republic. We're a democracy, a rule by the people. So people choose leaders and then we follow those leaders. In a theocracy, God chooses the leaders, He sets the rules, and we follow them. So here's the thing, listen. Where church and state are combined, this is why if you break one of the religious laws, like the fourth commandment, you go pick up sticks on the Sabbath, What do you get? Capital punishment. So state laws and religious laws are in some sense intertwined. Now, that's going to make sense when I explain these three tithes. There were three tithes. Number one, the Levitical tithe. You can see the references in the notes. The Levitical tithe was given to the Levites. And why did they get a tithe? All the tribes of Israel got land inheritance except for the Levites, okay? And here's the thing, they were an agrarian society, so everybody got their plots of land and they grew things on that land or, I'm sorry, they grew things on that land or they shepherded things on that land and then that was their produce and from that increase, whether it was olives or pomegranates or sheep or bull or oxen, they would give a 10% tithe to the Levites because the Levites' inheritance was God. And so they were to serve in the temple and they would be provided for by the people. So the Levitical tithe, if you think of it, was a tithe to the government to fund the government religious officials to serve in a religious manner, okay? That was for the government. Secondly, and that was 10%, and that was once a year. Once a year, 10% to the Levites, to the government. Secondly, there was a, don't tell me, there was a festive tithe, a festive tithe. Now you read of all these festivals in the Old Testament, Feast of Booths, Feast of Tabernacles, Passover, all these things. You know what they basically were in layman's terms? They were like a huge national potluck. It was like what we do on Sunday on steroids for the whole nation. So they celebrated sometimes for weeks at a time and they ate food and they drank and they make merry. Well, who do you think provided for all that? Well, the people had to provide for that. So the people would bring 10 percent of their produce to provide for these festivals. And so that went to the community. So Levitical to the government festive to the community. And then there was one more tithe called the charitable tithe or the charity tithe or the welfare tithe. Now, instead of being given once a year, this was given every three years, 10 percent every three years, which breaks down to what? Three point three percent every year. And this was given to the widows, the orphans, the poor and the foreigners. OK, because God cared for them and he wanted to take care of them. So when you add all that up, you get twenty three point three percent. Now, there are additional offerings. I'm not going to go into them. But here's the thing, if you wanna make the Old Testament your standard for giving, it would be 23.3%. Now, let's come into the New Testament, all right? So we come into the New Testament, there's this one incident in Matthew 23, verses 23 and 24, where Jesus rebukes the scribes and the Pharisees. He says, woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you tithe on cumin and mint and dill. But you forsake the what? The weightier matters of the law. OK, specifically, he says justice and mercy and faithfulness. Now, this is what he says. These you ought to have done without neglecting the others. So what is he saying? You ought to have tithed. But you should not have neglected the other things. Now, what is the main teaching that he's getting at? Don't be a hypocrite in your giving. Don't think that you are self-righteous because you do these things. But can we take Jesus's affirmation of tithing as a normative prescription for the new covenant people of God? Well, here's the problem. Had Jesus been resurrected yet? No. Had the church began the day of Pentecost yet? No. The new covenant had not been ratified yet. And there are actually many things that Jesus says in his teachings that aren't applicable for us today. In Matthew chapter 10, he tells the disciples to go out and preach the gospel. But he says, don't go to the Gentiles, just go to the Jews. So does that become normative for us today, you see? And so you have to be very careful. You have to use this hermeneutical lens to look at the things that Jesus says that continue into the new covenant and the things that were still under the Mosaic covenant. Because when Jesus was teaching, he was still under the Mosaic covenant. So I don't think that we can necessarily take this affirmation of Jesus of tithing to be normative for today. So here's the thing. Let me conclude on this head. In the Old Covenant, you had church and state. In some passages in the Old Covenant, the tithes that were given were referred to as gifts and offering because they were worshiped to the Lord. In other passages in 2 Chronicles, you know what they're called? They're called taxes. They're called taxes. Because they were owed, they were required, they were things that as a member of the covenant you must pay. So both government needed to be paid and God needed to be paid. So now, when you have a theocracy that in the new covenant is broken up, and now we're no longer under the theocracy, there's a separation of church and state, what do we find in the new covenant? Well, with regard to taxes, Paul says emphatically, Romans 13, pay your taxes, you must do them. Jesus says, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. But now, what do we do with the offerings to God? Does the New Testament, after Pentecost, give any percentage of income that we are to give? And the answer is no, okay? Now, here's what I'm gonna do. Let me just start this third head and then I'll end early and we can take some questions and I'll leave the rest for next week, okay? What does the New Testament teach on giving? Once Jesus ascends and the church commences in Acts chapter two, we're now under a new administration and the new covenant. So as I said, we're not under law, we are under grace. Furthermore, Paul says in 2 Corinthians 9, let a person give according to what he has determined in his heart. Now, in the past, I'm just going to confess to you, I used to teach and I used to believe that we need, it was a command for us in the new covenant to teach 10%, to give 10%. And whenever I would come to that passage in 2 Corinthians 9, it was really hard for me to force it into what Paul is saying. If Paul believed that we needed to give 10%, why would he say, let a person give as he is determined in his heart? Paul seems to be echoing something else that's coming from the law. What Paul is saying sounds like a free will offering. And in fact, there was another kind of offering in the old covenant called precisely that. It was called a free will offering. And in fact, in Exodus 25, when they were building the tabernacle, God told Moses to have all the people offer up offerings for the tabernacle. We're not talking about goats and sheep. We're talking about materials. But he said it's not required. You just tell them every man who determined in his own heart, according to his ability, what he should give. That sounds exactly like what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 9. And guess what? Check this out. The people, it says in the next chapter, in Exodus chapter 35, gave so much that Moses had to come in and say, okay, stop, we're closing the doors, no more contributions, you can't give anymore. When's the last time you heard a church say that? What does that tell you about that principle of freewill giving? What does it tell you? Well, it's certainly a matter of the heart. When people are motivated to give out of gratitude based on grace, I would say they give more. I would say they give more because they don't get caught in what I'm gonna call the 10% rut. You know what the 10% rut is? People start giving 10%, which, by the way, is a wonderful thing, wonderful thing to do. I don't discourage it, I encourage it. But you can give 10% for the rest of your life and be completely comfortable and can close your heart to needs, and the church can close your heart to needs around you, and you, like the Pharisee, can think, I've done my part. I've given my 10%. I've paid my dues. You're not in a theocracy. You're not paying taxes. You're giving to the Lord. And guess what? Guess what? The main principle, the main motivation in the New Testament is forgiving. I'll give you the first and then we'll stop. Turn to 2nd Corinthians chapter 8. 2nd Corinthians chapter 8. And next week we'll be spending more time on this. Second Corinthians chapter eight, I'm going to look at seven through nine, and we're closing with this. But let me just say Second Corinthians eight and nine is Paul exhorting the Corinthians to give to the poor saints in Jerusalem who are suffering want probably because of a famine. And in the course of exhorting the Corinthians to give, he doesn't command them to give. He puts before them an example, an example of the Macedonians that we'll look at in more depth next week. But these Macedonians, Paul lifts up and he says, Corinthians, I want you to consider what the Macedonians did. They are poorer than you are. They have less resources than you are. They are in greater affliction than you are. And even in the midst of their affliction, in dire and difficult circumstances, they gave according to their means and beyond their means. And he says, I commend this to you as an example, not as a command, but that you might show your love. And so on the one hand, while this is in the context of giving to needy saints, I think 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 give us principles for giving in general. And here's the first principle. Giving is initiated by God's grace. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 8, 7 through 9, that as you excel in everything, in faith and speech and knowledge, in all earnestness and in love for you, see that you excel in this act of grace. For I say not as a command, but to prove by the earnestness of others that your love also is genuine. For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor so that you by his poverty might become rich. What is the motivation for giving? It's the gospel. It's Jesus Christ has given everything for you, and so you, out of gratitude, not to pay back, it's not a debtor's ethic, you could never pay him back, but out of the wellspring of gratitude that wells up in your heart for what he has done, worship God with your money. Worship God and give. Take care of the needs of the saints. Take care of the needs of the ministry. Take care of your pastor. Take care of the ministries of the church because Christ has done this and so much more for you. So this is our primary and all-consuming motivation for giving in the new covenant. So let me just say this. When you sit down to write a check or if you're all cash or gold bars, whatever it is, When you sit down to consider what you're going to give, you don't sit down at the foot of Mount Sinai and consider what percentage I give. You don't sit down at the foot of tradition and upbringing to say how much did I give. You sit at the foot of the cross. And you say, Jesus Christ, out of gratitude for what you have done, this check could never repay what you have done. But I give it to you as a small token of my gratitude to you for all that you have done. So that's the first and best place that we can start is at the foot of the cross. So next week. We will unpack a little bit more what that looks like. And what I want to do is just glean some principles next week from 2 Corinthians 8, 9, and then 1 Corinthians 16. And then I want to give and hopefully talk about some just practical suggestions for how to think about giving. Okay. All right. We've got a few minutes. Does anybody have any questions? Yes. Right. Yep. So right, right. Yeah. So what our confession says is that the civil and the ceremonial have expired with the end of the people of God. What continues is what we call the general equity. Okay, so it's a principle you have to kind of wrestle with, but general equity means it's kind of like saying the spirit of the law. And so you take the spirit of the law, the general equity, the general weight of it, and you apply the principle. So that's why even today we can say, look, while I'm not looking for requirements for presidency from the kings of the Old Testament, In general, a general equity is that he must be a fearer of God in some sense. He must have dignity. He must have some semblance of morality. He must have some sense of justice. I'm not looking to him to be my pastor, but the general equity of kind of the common law, the natural law that runs throughout the Old Covenant can in a general way be applied. So we can do it with things like that. The difficulty with the tithe is how do you get the general equity of 10%? That's a very concrete number. So it's kind of hard to say the general equity of 10% is 10%. I think the general equity of giving in the Old Testament is something that crosses over, which is it should be generous. It should be sacrificial. It should be proportionate. It should be from the top, those types of things. But what we're reckoning with is the 10%. So what our divines have done is they've said in general, We take those laws, but we don't want to press them too far, because we don't want to be guilty of legalism or Judaism. I know that doesn't answer every question, but that's kind of a general... Right. See, where I would go with that is I would just go more to natural law rather than mosaic law. I think natural law itself would see that as something repugnant. And then science today would tell us, like, there's some complications. Huh? Right, right, that's true But just because people practice something doesn't mean that it was in accordance with natural law There were many things that people did pre mosaic that were contrary to the mosaic Contrary to the natural law and Paul talks about that in Romans chapter 1 If you need to go and get your kids go ahead. Yeah, Phil Uh-huh Normative yeah It also says don't commit adultery, and if I commit bestiality, I'm committing adultery, right? Uh-huh. Well, when you say Paul is saying you should be going back to, what are you specifying? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I would follow our divines in the confession that talk about the general equity of the law. So kind of the same as what I'd say, Dave, I would have a problem with saying when Paul says sexual immorality, that's a footnote to all the specific laws in the Mosaic covenant. I think that that's problematic. Yeah. I so what I'm saying is I don't think that he's specifying, hey, if you want to learn more, just go to Moses and he'll tell you. I don't think that's what he's saying. Now, that doesn't mean that doesn't mean that some of the things that Moses says in the Old Covenant are are OK. OK. You have to take into consideration natural law. Natural law tells us that many of these things that Moses spoke against are wrong and we should follow natural law. And we can use the New Testament as a guide to help us navigate. But you would have to give a specific example like people bring up It's a valid argument to say, well, bestiality, the prohibition against bestiality is nowhere found in the new covenant. So does that mean it's okay? No, that's not what we're saying. It's not what I'm saying. Bestiality is sexual relations with someone outside the covenant of marriage. So that's adultery. I don't care if it's a fairy, an ox or another woman, it's adultery. And so it's a violation of a normative command for us as a people of God. So, you know, I mean, you can get into questions of, Moses gave many examples of not having relations during menstrual menstruality and stuff like that. How far you apply those things, again, I would say general equity. And you would have to flesh out what that means. But let me put it this way. I wouldn't go to someone and say, you can't do X because Moses says it. That's one thing I wouldn't do. Because, for example, you say, don't get a tattoo because Moses said don't get a tattoo. Well, right before that, he said, don't wear clothes made of more than one material. How do you keep one and not the other? Again, my answer is I use the hermeneutic of the New Testament, which says unless it's affirmed, repeated, or positive law, a new law is given in the new covenant. We don't follow it. Does that make sense? Okay. Yeah. It's not a hard and fast rule. There were many laws before the Mosaic law. Hammurabi's code came before the Mosaic law. Well, yes, yes. Not in the way that you're thinking, but I believe that when so when Hammurabi creates a law for his people, OK, I believe that that is in some sense natural law from God fleshed out in that particular culture. OK, so natural law is God's law. And natural law was codified in the Mosaic covenant with a bunch of extra stuff that was temporal. And it had what we call planned obsolescence. It was to be put out of place. It was meant to be temporal. But the kernel of it, which is moral law, natural law, continues. Now, here's the thing. I know that some of this is frustrating. You're not theonomy, which says all the Mosaic law is for us today. They inherit a different set of problems, all kinds of other problems. Okay. All I'm saying, yeah, all I want to say just to kind of recap is. You get a principle or a hermeneutic to try to relate Old Covenant to New Covenant, and then you've got to roll up your sleeves and you've got to start working through things specifically. There's no one hermeneutical silver bullet that, like, that answers all my problems. You still have to work through these things, and that just takes time. And that takes taking one specific issue at a time, comparing and contrasting biblical revelation, natural law. and even philosophical thinking and trying to figure out how that fleshes out in the context of New Covenant Church, and then how it fleshes out in the context of society, that's a whole other discussion. And there's a lot of liberty in how we do that. All right, any other questions? Okay, please come back next week so I can round things off a little bit. Because what I'm going to say next week is, among other things, pastoral wisdom and suggestion, 10% is a great set of training wills to start with, okay? But I'll qualify that next week and we'll talk more about it, okay? So let's pray. Father God, thank you for this evening. Give us grace and energy as we enter into this week. We might glorify you in all that we do. We ask these things in your son's name, amen.