turn in our Bibles to Exodus chapter number 20, Exodus chapter number 20. And we'll continue in our series through the Ten Commandments. And we'll be looking at the Eighth Commandment tonight. Eighth Commandment, thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not steal. I think I forgot to move that up there. Let's see here. I must have given them the wrong slide number. Sorry about that. There we go. Exodus 20 and verse 15. I don't know if any of you have ever been caught stealing anything. I have two distinct memories. I think I've shared these maybe before, but I was just a little kid and I took a pack of gum or something off of the rack right by the cash register, stuck it in my pocket, and we got home. God knows how to make sure our sins find us out, right? And my mom reached in my pocket for whatever reason, and she pulled out a pack of gum, and she said, where did you get this? And I lied and said that dad bought it for me, and that was a really dumb thing to do, because what did she do, right? She asked my dad, did you buy this? No. I told him to put it back on the rack. Well, sure enough, I got caught. My dad drove me back to the store, like a good dad should, drove me back to the store, back into the line at that cash register. I looked that lady in the eye and I said, I am sorry. And he made me apologize to that lady at the cash register. And he paid for it. And I'm sure there were stars and stripes. I can't remember. But I do distinctly remember looking at that lady and saying, I am sorry. But that made a big impression upon me. There was another time, I remember first grade, that was lost and found. And I was the son of the librarian. So I got after school privileges, right? You know how it is. You get to wander around a little bit while mom's finishing up at the library. And so I wandered around, and I found some lost and found stuff outside one of the classrooms. And I decided I was going to take one of the toys and make it mine. Sure enough, I don't know, where do moms and dads get these sixth senses, you know? But I think I kind of and Kelly developed those as we became parents. But my mom, she found this toy. And she was like, this doesn't look familiar. Where did you get this? And of course, once again, I lied. And my mom read right between the lines. And she said, no, this doesn't belong to you. I fessed up. I had taken it from outside one of these classrooms, lost and found or whatever. And once again, I had the stars and stripes. And I learned, do not steal, thou shalt not steal. Now we think of it primarily in the area of property. But there's various forms of theft. And they're not always monetary. We'll talk about this a little bit. But the Bible is very clear. You know, I love the Word of God. And one of the characteristics of the Word of God that I love so much is the simplicity. Are there passages that are deep and complicated, so to speak? And I love how the Word of God can be a lifelong study for even the greatest theologians. and yet be simple enough that our young people across the hall can learn Bible truths and be saved and Aidan can get saved on Sunday afternoon. I love the depth and the breadth and the length and the width of the Bible that it's so simple and yet it is so rich and deep that there are theological truths that take lifetimes and doctoral degrees and we still don't know everything. Because we'll never know everything because we're never going to be God. And we'll always have that separation, even though we will know, even as we are known, according to first Corinthians 13, there's a level of knowledge that God will reveal to us once we enter into glory. And we're thankful for the increasing knowledge of God that we have as we grow in our knowledge of him and the word of God. But I love the fact that the Bible is so simple. and yet it can be so deep and so rich and so theological. So it's a simple command, but again, it can be so hard to obey. Thou shalt not steal. Now, what does it mean to steal? Well, if we just look at the English, excuse me, the Hebrew word transliterated into the English G-A-N-A-B, It means to thieve, to carry away, secretly bring or secretly carry away, to carry away that which doesn't belong to you is implied, to get by stealth. It means, if we were to look at the Oxford Dictionary, it means to take another person's property without permission or legal right to do so, with no intention of returning it. Webster, to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular Now, we know that thievery, robbery, is more than just physical property. We talk about intellectual rights, and then we'll get into some of the data and the digital, and there are areas of robbery and thievery that now involve intellectual property and digital property, but we understand this to be the wrong or the illegal, I'm just going to go ahead and say sinful taking of someone else's property that does not belong to them. This is one of the key principles, commands, from which we get the concept of personal property and ownership. This is something that our country having been founded on biblical principles, at least having respect for and reverence for biblical principles in a lot of ways, just look at our founding documents, look at some of the monuments in Washington, D.C., and it's clear that there was a fear of God, there was a knowledge of God, there was a respect and a reverence for the word of God and for God. So when the Constitution of our country was written, There was actually, at one point, a draft. We know that the Constitution talks about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but I understand that there was a draft. I'm not sure exactly where it was in the constitutional conventions, but there was a draft that was introduced that said life, liberty, and personal property. Now that was written into law and in amendments and in other areas of law, but I actually like that a little bit better than the pursuit of happiness because happiness gets defined in a lot of different ways nowadays. And happiness is not, sadly, it's not biblically defined much anymore. But the whole idea of personal property, Private ownership is derived from a biblical principle that we can derive from this commandment. This is another reason Marxism, communism, socialism is wrong. The government does not have the right to own all of our personal and private property. But that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to own everything and make every decision for us. This whole lie of the devil in socialism and Marxism, communism, is that if we just all have mutual equality, we'll all get along, and everybody will be happy. That is a lie from the pits of hell, because we're sinners by nature, and so communism, Marxism, all of those isms that are lined up with communism and Marxism, They all are wrong, first of all, and they deny the sinfulness of man, and secondly, they deny God and his sovereign rule and authority, and in most cases, his existence. Right there, those two premises alone make those evil. And we see that there's a push in our country for those. And it comes down to, and not just the idea of rejecting God and taking his authority away, but it even comes down to our personal human rights. Okay. And I don't want to get too carried away with the whole rights talk, but the whole idea of having personal private property and ownership that has been foundational to our country and it's being threatened. in various ways, but it's drawn from this command, from this principle, from even the Mosaic law. And we see in Acts where the church in its early days as thousands of converts who had come from afar were sharing, it wasn't a mandated government mandated, Pope mandated, church leader mandated sharing. It was a mutual giving because there were people who were stranded, who had come from far away and now were saved and want to go back to their heathen lands, knew they might be rejected by their family and they said, we want to stay. And the church people, the saved, the believers, the Christians gave to meet their needs. And so we understand personal property and ownership. even from this commandment. So what does theft involve? Well, bribery. Isaiah 1 and verse 23 speaks to that. I remember being in Africa, we got pulled over by a Kenyan police officer. The missionary was doing nothing wrong. And he said, it's not unusual for the Mzungu, the white man, to get pulled over. And the Kenyan police, they made very little money. most of the money, I shouldn't say most, from what the missionary told me, he said a lot of their money they got from bribes. And so when they saw a white man driving by, they looked at him as dollar signs, rich. And so they pulled him over and the missionary began to have a conversation. And I didn't understand everything, but I knew enough, understood enough that the policeman was asking for a bribe. And the missionary was being very respectful and eventually the policeman let us go and the missionary gave him no money and there was no ticket. And the missionary was explaining to me that the police, they want to bribe. And unfortunately, in a lot of countries, bribery is the way to get things done. One of our missionaries that came through just visiting, we did not take him on for full support, but they were going to the Solomon Islands, and he talked about one of the ways that they get things done in the Solomon Islands is through bribery. And if you are corrupt, you better be good at it, because the most conniving and the most corrupt, deceitful, manipulative, are the ones who typically get the most money, get the most power, can get the most things done. Isn't that sad? And they leave the people in poverty. They leave the people without being able to develop their talents and their abilities and their ingenuities and their creativities and their discoveries. And the government is often milking the people and keeping them in poverty. So theft involves bribery. It involves withholding what is rightfully due someone. James 5 talks about the rich not even paying their laborers what is due them. Is that not stealing? Is that not theft when a corporation, when a boss, when a manager doesn't pay accordingly, appropriately? I know there are all kinds of economic factors that come into play, but there is a theft of someone's labor, of someone's energy, of someone's ability when we don't give them, pay them what is rightfully theirs, what is fair and what is appropriate. Talk about larceny, plagiarism, even plagiarism was in the news within the last year or so when the president of Harvard was caught with multiple plagiarisms, but there was a pushback on whether she should get fired, demoted. suspended or whatever because of her ethnicity and it became a race issue. And there were people saying, well, she's a DEI hire, she's a diversity hire, so therefore she should be exempted from her stealing other people's work and then calling it hers. So she stole and she lied. Plagiarism is both. I remember dealing with kids in school, literally. Homework page of the smart student, homework page of the not as smart student. And what is the not as smart or not as well planned or not as diligent? What is the other student doing? They're copying directly off of. And I would catch them or the teacher would catch them red handed. And sometimes they would argue, I would even have parents defend their kids. They would literally get upset with the demerits or whatever. the F, the 50%, whatever it was, and they would sometimes, I would even sometimes have the parents mad at me, or the teacher, because we dared to call that cheating. You're copying from the other student's paper. We would deal with cheating in school, it became harder and harder, kids were, we had bans on cell phones in school, but then they started bringing their Apple watches. And so we were having to have them take their Apple watches off. And then there were the kids who always just seemed to be absent on the day that there was a major test. And why was that? Why was that sneaky student always absent on the day of the test? Because then they could get the answers from the other kids so that when they came back to school, they could cheat on the, I mean, just multiple ways. We could get into the plagiarism and I would talk to the kids about how it's lying and it is cheating. Embezzlement, fraud, copyright violations, pirating. The internet's full of pirated videos. Literally people will take their phones or their cameras and they will record a movie on the screen and then post it. Now I think some of these streaming channels and some of these websites have gotten more diligent about it. But we would have homework sites where the kids would literally, they would cheat. Abeka and BJU Press would have tests, especially with Abeka. ABECA had to really deal with this hard, but ABECA had entire tests and quizzes posted online, and they would use the same tests and quizzes that they'd used for the last 20 years, and so all of the families, we literally, we had a family, oh, they were the precious, I'm sorry, I'm gonna get really cynical here, I'm sorry, I gotta watch my attitude. It was a good family. But they had to have all A students all the time, every test, every quiz. If they got a 99, it was a world's crisis. So they were literally buying the curriculum and getting the quizzes and tests ahead of time, and then as their kids would take the tests and quizzes in school, they already had the answer keys at home. and we called them out on it, and they were acting like it was not that big of a deal, we're just studying with them ahead of time. You actually have the physical test at home that you bought as a homeschool, which means you lied on the form when they ask you about being a homeschool family. You lied and said you were when you actually had your kids at the Christian school, and then they were already smart kids, they already would have been all A students. but they had to have 100 every time, and if they got a 99, then it was the teacher's fault and the principal's fault, and you know how it goes, okay? I'm sorry for a little bit of my cynicism coming out, but that's how far even good, this was a good Christian family with high standards, so we thought, but they were lying and cheating just to be able to get the all A, to get the reward, to get the honor. I mean, it goes on and on. We get into cybercrime, identity theft, catfishing, stolen images, now AI. I can't even begin to go into. I get a tech newsletter every day. I try to keep up a little bit. And it's disgusting some of the things that are going on now. Boys that are taking images of their female classmates and they're doing AI images of them. Inappropriate images. It's disgusting. Catfishing where they take internet images and they change the face so they take somebody who is on Facebook or has an Instagram account and they change it all around and make it look like somebody else or they take that image and they borrow that image. This murderer of these two girls up here in Delphi, there was a catfishing incident because they were suspecting a guy who killed those girls and he had stolen images from some bodybuilding guy. That's another reason why we gotta tell our kids to watch out who you're following online. It could be some 40-year-old pot-smoking, beer-bellied freak who's pretending to be a 16-year-old girl. It happens a lot and they meet up, they rendezvous. And she gets there, and she's hidden this all from her parents, and he's a 40-year-old pot-smoking, beer-bellied freak. Now what's she gonna do? Especially if she's hidden this from her parents. I don't mean to be mean, or scary, or rude, or negative, but it happens. It's reality, it's what happens. It's cheating, and it's stealing, kidnapping, car thefts. on and on and on we could go in the internet, the bots, the scams, AT&T just had almost every single one of its accounts hacked. Yes, Star? Yeah, check washing where they bleach out the writing and redo it or the numbers or whatever. Yeah, yeah, Brian. Oh, yes. Yeah, and you get into the Medicare fraud, the Medicaid fraud, and identity theft. It's just, it's really, really bad. And I mean, I printed an email, I'm not even going to go through it, but I printed an email that I got from this tech company that I get an email from every day. And she has a list of 10 ways to protect your information and your finances and your identity this summer while you're on vacation. And it's just It looks like just simple practical stuff, but it just goes to show what the people are doing, how they're trying to steal. People are sending money to strangers in the hundreds of dollars with the promise that they're going to get something in return, and then they shut the account down and they run off with the hundreds of dollars. False advertisement about tickets. So you go to a website that you think is legit for a concert or a ball game, and the people are taking hundreds of dollars in tickets, and there's no tickets, because it's not a legitimate company. It just goes on and on with the stealing, the theft. The Bible is clear. Leviticus 19, in the details of the law, there's a repetition of this command, and there's an expansion of it. Deuteronomy 5, Moses again in his final sermon, In Deuteronomy, he repeats this command. We could go into Isaiah chapter number 10, and we'll come back to this again next week. We only have a few minutes left, but Isaiah chapter number 10, there's the stolen justice. Now this involved probably money as well, but in their taking advantage of the widows and the poor and the needy, notice Isaiah 10 in verse two, to turn aside the needy from judgment, that'd be justice. take away the right from the poor of my people, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless." And this is an area that the prophet Isaiah very clearly condemns the leadership of Israel. And one of the ways in which they were right for judgment was because of their exploitation of the needy, the hopeless, stealing from them, robbing them of justice, and obviously exploiting them for money. Isn't gambling a form of government theft? It's taking and robbing the poor. It's a volunteer tax. Most millionaires are not standing in the lottery line. It's taking from a bunch of people and giving to one or two people, a small group. It's a form of theft, government theft. Think about all of the apps now for gambling. We'll get into covetousness later. commandment number 10 that feeds this robbery and thievery and stealing. But there is clear biblical principles against gambling. And it is a way that the government fleeces the people. And who always wins besides the government? The house does. There's a bunch of people behind the scenes in the casino making a lot of money. And I understand from what I have been told, there are people who never leave Las Vegas. They go there with what they have. They lose it all, and they become homeless. And there is a homeless population in Las Vegas of people who went to Las Vegas thinking that they were going to win it all, and they lost everything, and now they're stuck. It's a magnet for all sorts of vice and wickedness. it's a form of thievery. Jeremiah 7 and verse 9, will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom you know not? Notice how all those are associated. Isn't stealing, yes, of course it's involving money, usually property most of the time, but look how closely murder, and immorality, adultery, lying, idolatry, look how closely all those are associated. Ezekiel 22, 29, the people of the land have used oppression, exercised robbery, have vexed the poor and needy, yea, they have oppressed the stranger wrongfully. Amos 3 and verse 10, for they know not to do right, sayeth the Lord, who store up violence and robbery in their palaces. Robbery refers to the spoil that they have taken, even their violence and taken. And the Nahum is actually a prophecy against Nineveh. And Nineveh was known for its violence, and its lies, and its robbery. Of course, it was an idolatrous city. We know that it repented at one point when Jonah went, and the city of Nineveh repented. And I fear that America is on the same path as Nineveh, unless we repent. And more and more, the theme of our message, of course, the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to all who believe, the Jew first and also to the Greek. But more and more, it seems like our message is one of judgment coming, like Jonah's message to Nineveh. Same gospel, but it seems like more and more, the emphasis is on the judgment. And we are seeing that our nation is ripe for judgment. We're already in a measure of judgment right now. at least a sowing and reaping judgment, if not some consequential and catastrophic judgment, but I fear that we're on the verge of a cataclysmic judgment. And we know that there's a judgment coming for the world during the tribulation, but Nineveh was a bloody city full of lies and robbery. And then there was, and I am getting way ahead of myself, I am so sorry, there we go. And then there is the robbery of God himself. Malachi 3 and verse 8. Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. When we don't give, when we don't tithe, when we're not faithful in our giving, we are robbing God, which it all belongs to him in the first place, right? We're only giving back a portion of what he has given us already. that already belongs to him. Luke 16 and verse 11 talks about being unfaithful on unrighteous mammon. How then can he commit to our trust the true riches? Unfaithfulness in the unrighteous mammon and the money and the property and what God has given us. Again, this is gonna be part of that attitude that results in the actions of robbery, of stealing, of thievery. And there are some people, they cannot They cannot, they're, what do they call them, kleptomaniacs. They're just addicts to stealing. And they can't see any money lying around. They can't see things that other people have without having a covetous spirit and then finding a way to take them. You've been maybe around people like that where you can't have anything at work, maybe. I'm thankful. We had a, I'll close with this, but we had a girl come to our school. And she came from a public school, and our lost and found would sometimes grow gigantic. And the girl came to our school, and after I don't know how many weeks, she saw our lost and found, and she said, what is that? And we said, it's our lost and found. She said, lost and found? She said, the school I came from, there was no such thing. You lost it, it never got found again. No one ever turned anything in. They just found it and it was gone. And maybe you've been around places like that at work or whatever and you lock everything up and you know that you can't trust anything lying around because it's gone. And I know that there are neighborhoods where you leave your car unlocked. There's people going through and checking doors and they see things on the inside, even in a parking lot with lots of lights on. They'll break through to steal something out of a backseat or whatever. So there are some people, they cannot handle any kind of money or property. They're just addicted to thieving, to robbing, to stealing. That is our Bible study for tonight. We'll wrap this up next week and look at some principles on hope for the thief. There is hope for the thief. Let's pray. Thank you, Lord, for