Love is honesty
This week's goodness is on Deuteronomy 25:13-16:
I thought these verses were interesting. Deuteronomy is one of the boring books to me, but I read it once or twice a year anyway, in case God has a message for me in there someplace. The law about the weights struck me as similar to what Jesus talked about, which would make sense since it's from the same source!
Back in the day, people used to provide their own weights when selling things. There was no standard "pound" or "kilogram" measurement to use. There wasn't a standard "foot" or "meter" anywhere. People found something that weighed about a pound or was about a foot long and used that.
Dishonest people would have two sets of weights. One for people they liked, and one for people they didn't. One for measuring things to themselves, and one for measuring things for others. Are you selling five pounds of rice? Use the heavy weight and you've sold five honest pounds to your friend. Use the light weight and you've sold four and a half pounds for the price of five. Or use an even heavier weight when buying that same rice from the farmer and you'd get six pounds of rice for the price of five. There was no standards agency, so it was an easy way to cheat people.
God told the Israelites that they must use accurate and honest weights and measures if they wanted to survive, because God detests people who deal dishonestly. That's the sort of statement you have to let sink in a bit. Why would weights and measures affect our livelihood? How could our success and our health be damaged by what some people would just call shrewdness or favoritism? How would something like keeping two sets of books, one for us and one for the tax man, make God go as far as to despise us?
Jesus told us to love others as ourselves. Is it an act of love to make your neighbor pay too much for his rice so that you can make some extra cash? Would you feel loved if your supplier charged you extra for no reason other than greed? If the answers to those questions are different, you're carrying two different sets of weights around.
Jesus told us to love our enemies, that it was pointless to just love our friends. We should not only love our friends but even our enemies. How is that possible when you have two different sets of weights? Isn't the whole point of differing weights to distinguish between "us" and "them?"
Jesus told us that whatever measure we used, it would be measured back to us with the same measure. We can't use differing weights. We can't distinguish between "our people" and "those people." We can't distinguish between "us" and "them," or "me" and "everyone else." God is love, and God calls us to love all people. Even the strangers. Even the costly ones. Even the evil ones. Which of us has God ever turned to and said "you're unlovable?"
This is actually a really difficult command to carry out, when you look at the mechanics of it. It's so natural to despise things in others that we cherish in ourselves or to cherish in others things we despise in ourselves. It's natural to want to make others pay extra while wanting to get a deal for us and our own. But that's not the gospel. That's not even the harsh Old Testament law. That's the flesh, our meat-nature, the same hardwiring used in animals to guide them blindly towards winning the fight to the death over scarce resources. Satan's meat puppet, or beloved child of God, created in His image? Your choice.
Think about it though. If your girlfriend is fat, and you recognize that and love her just as much as if she wasn't, can you then despise yourself for not having a good figure yourself? You have to use the same measurement. You can't hate yourself for something you don't hate in others. You can't say one person is lovely and the other is disgusting. Neither of you have good swimsuit bodies. Both of you are completely lovable anyway.
Conversely, how can you condemn your sister for sleeping around when you are perfectly at peace with yourself for having fathered a child out of wedlock? Both of you messed up in God's eyes. Both of you can make better decisions in the future. Both of you may have to live with the consequences for the rest of your lives. But you can't say one person is OK and the other one is a whore. You have to use the same weights.
If you really think about it, almost nobody thinks like this. The son of the judge or the brother of the police chief get away with almost anything in some places, because we naturally want to be more lenient with those we love than we are with outsiders. The judge's son drives drunk and kills someone's kid? "It was an honest mistake. He was going through a rough time. Isn't taking a kid's life punishment enough? Let him go." But then someone loses control of their vehicle on ice and kills the judge's kid? "Negligence! Manslaughter! Throw the book at him! He'll never see the light of day again!" Our love is feeble and inconsistent, rooted in an animal instinct for self-preservation and cutthroat competition.
Using the same weight for your friends and your enemies is honesty. It puts the animal nature to death. You no longer have the right to plow others under to enrich your own. You no longer have the luxury of escaping accountability for your actions by pointing at others. Everything is laid bare with God's metric system. We all get forgiven or none of us do. We all have to answer for our actions or none of us do. We can't pick and choose, lavishing grace on those we befriend, and punishment on those we hate. We can't discipline those we love but let those we despise continue on a destructive path. We have to use the same weights for both.
Differing weights is deceit and it promotes deceit. If you lie to others, others will lie to you. Trust falls apart under deception, and society falls apart when trust is gone. How can we survive if we use dishonest measures? If we lie to each other, and cheat people in the fog of a marketplace where everyone carries their own weights, soon there won't be a marketplace or a city to have it in. God despises those who deal dishonestly, because they've demonstrated that they don't have love. They've used one measure in accepting God's love, and used another in denying love to others.
God is love, and if you don't have it, how can you represent him? God has blessed us for doing nothing. Can we withhold our blessing from others and still represent him? God disciplines those he loves. Can we withhold discipline from others and still represent him? God forgives us when we make a decision to change and ask for mercy. Can we refuse those who come to us asking for mercy and still represent him? God is stable in our lives even as we kick against him and do things he despises, always accepting us back with open arms. Can we abandon or lash out against people who do the same to us, and still represent God's love to the world? These are not easy things.
To our animal nature, dishonesty seems like the best plan. But to our Godly nature, it means we curse ourselves with self-condemnation, cheat those around us by taking without giving, and destroy the society we live in by eroding trust to the point where things just fall apart. Stacking up all of the gains dishonesty would score for our animal nature, is it worth living in a world without love?
The same measure you use will be used on you. If you don't measure out some love, you may find none being measured out at all. No justice, no peace, no charity, no safety net, no second chances, no defense for the helpless, nobody to comfort you in your pain, nobody to eat with you in your loneliness, no warnings, no interventions, nobody to die on a cross when all else fails. Is any ill-gotten gain worth losing so much?
Take God's measure and use it in all things. Sometimes his measure will be heavier than yours, and sometimes it will be lighter. Love others as you love yourself and love yourself as you love others. If your love isn't full, get more. It's the only way we're going to get it right.
Do not have two differing weights in your bag—one heavy, one light. Do not have two differing measures in your house—one large, one small. You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. For the Lord your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.
I thought these verses were interesting. Deuteronomy is one of the boring books to me, but I read it once or twice a year anyway, in case God has a message for me in there someplace. The law about the weights struck me as similar to what Jesus talked about, which would make sense since it's from the same source!
Back in the day, people used to provide their own weights when selling things. There was no standard "pound" or "kilogram" measurement to use. There wasn't a standard "foot" or "meter" anywhere. People found something that weighed about a pound or was about a foot long and used that.
Dishonest people would have two sets of weights. One for people they liked, and one for people they didn't. One for measuring things to themselves, and one for measuring things for others. Are you selling five pounds of rice? Use the heavy weight and you've sold five honest pounds to your friend. Use the light weight and you've sold four and a half pounds for the price of five. Or use an even heavier weight when buying that same rice from the farmer and you'd get six pounds of rice for the price of five. There was no standards agency, so it was an easy way to cheat people.
God told the Israelites that they must use accurate and honest weights and measures if they wanted to survive, because God detests people who deal dishonestly. That's the sort of statement you have to let sink in a bit. Why would weights and measures affect our livelihood? How could our success and our health be damaged by what some people would just call shrewdness or favoritism? How would something like keeping two sets of books, one for us and one for the tax man, make God go as far as to despise us?
Jesus told us to love others as ourselves. Is it an act of love to make your neighbor pay too much for his rice so that you can make some extra cash? Would you feel loved if your supplier charged you extra for no reason other than greed? If the answers to those questions are different, you're carrying two different sets of weights around.
Jesus told us to love our enemies, that it was pointless to just love our friends. We should not only love our friends but even our enemies. How is that possible when you have two different sets of weights? Isn't the whole point of differing weights to distinguish between "us" and "them?"
Jesus told us that whatever measure we used, it would be measured back to us with the same measure. We can't use differing weights. We can't distinguish between "our people" and "those people." We can't distinguish between "us" and "them," or "me" and "everyone else." God is love, and God calls us to love all people. Even the strangers. Even the costly ones. Even the evil ones. Which of us has God ever turned to and said "you're unlovable?"
This is actually a really difficult command to carry out, when you look at the mechanics of it. It's so natural to despise things in others that we cherish in ourselves or to cherish in others things we despise in ourselves. It's natural to want to make others pay extra while wanting to get a deal for us and our own. But that's not the gospel. That's not even the harsh Old Testament law. That's the flesh, our meat-nature, the same hardwiring used in animals to guide them blindly towards winning the fight to the death over scarce resources. Satan's meat puppet, or beloved child of God, created in His image? Your choice.
Think about it though. If your girlfriend is fat, and you recognize that and love her just as much as if she wasn't, can you then despise yourself for not having a good figure yourself? You have to use the same measurement. You can't hate yourself for something you don't hate in others. You can't say one person is lovely and the other is disgusting. Neither of you have good swimsuit bodies. Both of you are completely lovable anyway.
Conversely, how can you condemn your sister for sleeping around when you are perfectly at peace with yourself for having fathered a child out of wedlock? Both of you messed up in God's eyes. Both of you can make better decisions in the future. Both of you may have to live with the consequences for the rest of your lives. But you can't say one person is OK and the other one is a whore. You have to use the same weights.
If you really think about it, almost nobody thinks like this. The son of the judge or the brother of the police chief get away with almost anything in some places, because we naturally want to be more lenient with those we love than we are with outsiders. The judge's son drives drunk and kills someone's kid? "It was an honest mistake. He was going through a rough time. Isn't taking a kid's life punishment enough? Let him go." But then someone loses control of their vehicle on ice and kills the judge's kid? "Negligence! Manslaughter! Throw the book at him! He'll never see the light of day again!" Our love is feeble and inconsistent, rooted in an animal instinct for self-preservation and cutthroat competition.
Using the same weight for your friends and your enemies is honesty. It puts the animal nature to death. You no longer have the right to plow others under to enrich your own. You no longer have the luxury of escaping accountability for your actions by pointing at others. Everything is laid bare with God's metric system. We all get forgiven or none of us do. We all have to answer for our actions or none of us do. We can't pick and choose, lavishing grace on those we befriend, and punishment on those we hate. We can't discipline those we love but let those we despise continue on a destructive path. We have to use the same weights for both.
Differing weights is deceit and it promotes deceit. If you lie to others, others will lie to you. Trust falls apart under deception, and society falls apart when trust is gone. How can we survive if we use dishonest measures? If we lie to each other, and cheat people in the fog of a marketplace where everyone carries their own weights, soon there won't be a marketplace or a city to have it in. God despises those who deal dishonestly, because they've demonstrated that they don't have love. They've used one measure in accepting God's love, and used another in denying love to others.
God is love, and if you don't have it, how can you represent him? God has blessed us for doing nothing. Can we withhold our blessing from others and still represent him? God disciplines those he loves. Can we withhold discipline from others and still represent him? God forgives us when we make a decision to change and ask for mercy. Can we refuse those who come to us asking for mercy and still represent him? God is stable in our lives even as we kick against him and do things he despises, always accepting us back with open arms. Can we abandon or lash out against people who do the same to us, and still represent God's love to the world? These are not easy things.
To our animal nature, dishonesty seems like the best plan. But to our Godly nature, it means we curse ourselves with self-condemnation, cheat those around us by taking without giving, and destroy the society we live in by eroding trust to the point where things just fall apart. Stacking up all of the gains dishonesty would score for our animal nature, is it worth living in a world without love?
The same measure you use will be used on you. If you don't measure out some love, you may find none being measured out at all. No justice, no peace, no charity, no safety net, no second chances, no defense for the helpless, nobody to comfort you in your pain, nobody to eat with you in your loneliness, no warnings, no interventions, nobody to die on a cross when all else fails. Is any ill-gotten gain worth losing so much?
Take God's measure and use it in all things. Sometimes his measure will be heavier than yours, and sometimes it will be lighter. Love others as you love yourself and love yourself as you love others. If your love isn't full, get more. It's the only way we're going to get it right.
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