On the Lawful Use of Earthly Goods (Bullinger’s third decade, second sermon)

more than a duty not to hurt

[Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from Bullinger’s Decades and have been lightly adapted.]

What is the duty of the law? I think many of us would naturally say, ‘don’t sin.’ That’s certainly true, but it doesn’t quite get to the heart of it. Maybe seeing the law as primarily ‘don’t sin’ actually reveals something about our own hearts, that fundamentally what God wants from us is a negative thing. ‘Don’t.’

Again, there is much in the law that is negative. Our sin, shown in its initial form in Genesis 3, is certainly a deep and dark negative. The sins forbidden in the moral law, the sins explained in painful detail throughout Leviticus, our sins (think 1 Corinthians 6.9-11), these are remarkably destructive things, tendencies, desires, words, actions. But is there more to the law than the negative?

Jesus’ summary of the law in Matthew 22.34-40 is positive rather than negative. Love God and love your neighbour. That’s Jesus’ summary of the law, how the law was always meant to be understood. Deuteronomy 6.5 and Leviticus 19.18 make this plain from the Old Testament, and Mark 12.28-34 shows that some of the people understood this in the time of the gospels. The Ten Commandments are given to God’s people as an expression of his covenant love for them, because he is a God who redeems his people from their slavery. But I so quickly want to make the law about ‘don’t’ rather than ‘love’.

Of course there’s a shallow way to do this, a saccharine way to cheapen God’s call for us to ‘love’. Bonhoeffer’s analysis of cheap grace (in The Cost of Discipleship) comes to mind: ‘Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.’ This is why many of us hear a contrast between ‘don’t’ and ‘love’ and it sets our teeth on edge. ‘Love’ and ‘grace’ have been grossly cheapened in our day. The church of our day is precisely what Bonhoeffer warned against. But genuine ‘love’, truly biblical ‘love’, requires us to ‘don’t’, and any ‘love’ that doesn’t ‘don’t’ isn’t really ‘love’ at all, especially in our love for God. But what’s the order? Jesus’ summary of the law puts ‘love’ before the ‘don’t’. ‘Love’ informs, explains, motivates, fuels the ‘don’t’.

So in Bullinger’s second sermon on the command against theft, his primary focus is not ‘don’t steal’, it’s ‘use your possessions as God’s gifts for you to enjoy yourself and for you to use to do good to others’. Three separate emphases show up in this sermon.

a duty to do good

Justice isn’t only about not defrauding others; it’s also about doing good to all men. It’s not enough for a godly man not to hurt anyone, he must also do good to all that he can. In this point many men sin. They are persuaded they have done the whole duty they owe if they don’t hurt people and they gain what they have without troubling anyone else, but they also have no concern for whether or not they help or do good to any man. He sins as greatly in the Lord’s sight who does not use his right possessions gained justly, as he who has heaped up wealth for himself wickedly and through ungodly means.

As we think about our possessions, our earthly riches, we have to think of them as tools by which we seek to do good to all men. This doesn’t mean we can actually do good to everyone, but we should seek to do good to anyone. We are given our money and our stuff with strings attached. Terms and conditions come with everything we have: use this for God’s glory and others’ good. That’s the heart behind the command against stealing. Stealing is defrauding those who lawfully possess their goods, and the heart that is willing to steal is necessarily unwilling to share generously. We’re not just taking unlawfully, we’re also failing to use lawfully.

That means we have a sacred responsibility given to us along with whatever money or possessions we have. The order of affections does apply here, but nearer loves oughtn’t be used to get us away from farther loves. God desires us to use our things for a specific purpose: the good of our fellow man. ‘Fellow man’ is a much broader concept than ‘merely my family’. It also reaches much farther than ‘my own people’, as we see from Acts 1.8. So God has given us our resources for us to use them for good, his good. That changes how we think about food and drink, about our homes, about our families. These aren’t merely mine, they’re God’s, and I have been given them on loan to use for His purposes.

repentance and restitution

Bullinger has a lengthy discussion on what to do if our goods or riches have been gained unlawfully. At the centre of this discussion are some absolutely brilliant distinctions. Are our hearts ‘well-disposed’, or do we just want to ‘appear as just men’? Piercing question isn’t it? Is the continual bent of our souls as redeemed men and women (remember the preface to the Ten Commandments) to love God and because we love him to obey him? Or do we want the appearance of godliness, following the form but denying the real power?

For a godly and well-disposed man desires and seeks with all his heart to obey God’s law; therefore, by calling out to God for help, he shall easily find a way to work justice and equity.

For those who want to love God, those who truly seek to love God, true repentance and restitution aren’t a burden. They follow naturally from what God has done for us.

As for those whose desire is rather to appear as just men than it is to actually be just and who love this world more than is appropriate to do, they – with their many questions and innumerable possibilities and provisos – make the subject of restitution so tedious and intricate that no one will ever be able to make it simple enough for them to understand.

Isn’t this how we so often respond to calls for repentance? ‘But what about…?’ ‘Is it really…?’ We come up with myriad responses like the rich young ruler, ‘he wishing to justify himself…’, and all for the purpose of evading the necessity of genuine repentance. This is why we see the law as negative. We chafe under the ‘don’t’ because the ‘love’ is absent in our hearts.

enjoying our possessions as God’s good gifts

One of the solutions to this problem of selfishness in possessions is to see all we have as God’s good gifts. Food and drink aren’t given us to serve our bellies. That path leads to gluttony and drunkenness. Instead, we eat and drink because God is good. Sex isn’t about fulfilling a physical need. That path leads to immorality, to beastliness in our desires and actions. Instead, human intimacy in the context of marriage is given us as an expression of a God who loves us and wants to give us a shadowy and earthly picture of the much greater heavenly and intimate relationship we can have with him. Earthly enjoyments are a demonstration of God’s Fatherly love. Physical pleasures point to even greater spiritual joys.

Every man must acknowledge that these earthly goods are simply the free gifts of our generous and heavenly Father; we don’t have these gifts because we deserve them or we’ve gained them through our power. For we have all we need to maintain our lives because of God’s generosity. It is the Lord who blesses and prospers our labour. Therefore, these earthly gifts are not evil, but instead they are God’s good gifts, which he gives us to maintain our lives.

Every so many years there’s a course-correction among Christians. We bounce between libertinism (overindulgence) and asceticism (begrudging refusal to enjoy). We love to indulge in our lusts, and we find ‘biblical’ justifications to have what we want. Then someone gets fed up with the triviality of it all, and there’s a new call to sell everything and give to the poor. There have always been various monastic trends within the church. Even in theologically conservative circles we face this tendency, except our versions of monasticism usually don’t involve devotion or theological depth, and they’re certainly lacking in repentance historically expressed in poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Bullinger sees scripture as offering a different approach.

Let no man be troubled in his conscience about the sweet and pleasant use of earthly goods, as though through enjoying and finding pleasure in these gifts he somehow sinned against God. Instead, let his conscience be concerned about using these earthly riches justly and lawfully. For the Lord has never forbidden happiness, joy, and the sweet use of wealth, as long as nothing be done indecently, unthankfully, or unrighteously.

Rather than feeling guilty for using what God has given us for our enjoyment, we should seek to use what God has given us for our enjoyment as something he intends us to use for our enjoyment. This isn’t baptising our lusts, but it’s being honest. We like homes, food, drink, sex, possessions. Scripture actually encourages us to enjoy these things. Rejoice in these things. Indulge in these things. Thank God for these things. And use them all for his glory. That last bit, using these things for God’s glory…I think we sometimes feel that that must mean we’re saying a prayer the whole way through (which for some of these would get a bit weird) or maybe not actually enjoying them all that much. I mean, real godliness requires a placid heart and a sombre face doesn’t it? We can be honest can’t we? Sitting down to a feast is much more fun than sitting through a sermon.

But that’s comparing apples and oranges. We can truly enjoy a sermon that stirs our hearts, pricks our consciences, and calls us to repentance. We can bask in the sweet communion, the comfort and conviction of a quiet morning in God’s word. And we can also enjoy a rich meal with dear friends, an intimate evening with our covenant-bound companion, the rest and relaxation that a roof over our head or suitable clothing provides. All these are God’s good and gracious gifts to his dear children.

And a heart that understands this will want to do good to others. We’ll want to use what we have for others; we’ll want this because we understand what God has given to us, Whom God has given for us. Abraham prepared a calf for his guests…that would have been a significant investment of time. Butchering a small cow and preparing a meal wasn’t a quick process. But he knew Who stood before him. When we understand who God is and what he’s done for us, we love to use what he’s given us for the good of those around us, whether rich or poor, great or small. We won’t resent the poor, we’ll delight to share with them, because that’s exactly what God has done for us.

A heart that understands ‘love’ – for God and for others – will delight in what we ‘do’ as well as seeking to avoid what we ‘don’t’.

Next, on bearing trials patiently

Tags: Plundering the Past