Reflections on God and Money: October 2013

Sunday 27 October 2013

An Idol in Israel (7)

That night the Lord said to [Gideon], ‘Take your father’s bull, and the second bull seven years old, and pull down the altar of Baal that your father has, and cut down the Asherah that is beside it and build an altar to the Lord your God on the top of the stronghold here, with stones laid in due order. Then take the second bull and offer it as a burnt offering with the wood of the Asherah that you shall cut down.’

Gideon said… ‘Let me make a request of you: every one of you give me the earrings from his spoil." … And they spread a cloak, and every man threw in it the earrings of his spoil. And the weight of the golden earrings that he requested was 1,700 shekels of gold, besides the crescent ornaments and the pendants and the purple garments worn by the kings of Midian, and besides the collars that were around the necks of their camels. And Gideon made an ephod of it and put it in his city, in Ophrah. And all Israel whored after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family.

As soon as Gideon died, the people of Israel turned again and whored after the Baals and made their god.

Judges 6:25-26, 8:24-27 & 8:33

To conclude the thought that I began yesterday, I have heard people say that if Christians tithe, God will bless them, often quoting Malachi chapter 3, as if tithing is all that is needed to please God. While tithing (that is, giving 10% of our income to the work of God in our churches and elsewhere) is the place to start thinking about our giving, and while it can be a good and helpful practice for many people, it has little merit for any who think that it an end in itself. It is not all there is to handling our money responsibility, especially anyone who thinks they are free to spend the remaining 90% in wanton selfishness, just because they can afford to!

I have heard Christian leaders say that by ‘sowing’ into their ministry, people can ‘reap’ an abundant harvest of blessing by getting back from God 30, 50 or 100 times as much as they gave. The parables of the sower in Matthew 14, Mark 4 and Luke 8, together with St Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 9 and Galatians 6, are sometimes cited in support of this. But while sowing and reaping is right, to do it selfishly is counterproductive and self-defeating.

These sorts of practices are no more than idols keeping Christian from true Christian liberty and lifestyle. They can narrow the focus of our spirituality. ‘As soon as Gideon died, the people of Israel turned again and whored after the Baals…’ This should not surprise us! Any idol, even one dressed up as Christian doctrine, is a stepping stone to more extreme idolatry!

Gideon turned the pagan shrine at Ophrah into a place of pilgrimage for Jews, by setting up giant gold ephod there. (I expect it was big because it was made with over 40 pounds, or about 19 kilos, of gold!) After he died, the people not only turned back to Baal worship but they made Baal-berith their special god.

Baal-berith means ‘lord of the covenant’! Might that familiarity have led many of the Israelites unawares into idolatry, mistaking it for their historic covenant with the one true God? Is it possible that we could be serving an idol that we think is true Christian spirituality?

I fear that the truth is that Christians do not have only small, Christian-like idols, such as tithing or sowing and reaping, but a great idol as alien as the shrine to Baal and Asherah that Gideon tore down. I plan to explain more next weekend but, in the meantime, I invite you to think deeply about how much influence money has on your lifestyle choices.

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Saturday 26 October 2013

An Idol in Israel (6)

And Gideon said to them, ‘Let me make a request of you: every one of you give me the earrings from his spoil’… And they answered, ‘We will willingly give them’. And they spread a cloak, and every man threw in it the earrings of his spoil. And the weight of the golden earrings that he requested was 1,700 shekels of gold, besides the crescent ornaments and the pendants and the purple garments worn by the kings of Midian, and besides the collars that were around the necks of their camels. And Gideon made an ephod of it and put it in his city, in Ophrah. And all Israel whored after it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family.

Judges 8:23-27

In stirring out of his complacency, Gideon had asked God for guidance using a fleece of sheep’s wool (see Judges chapter 6). After this, Gideon seems to become more attuned to hearing God’s voice in choosing his army from among all the volunteers and deciding the attack plan, but he later capitalises on the experience with the fleece and makes his home town a place where people could hope to get divine guidance. He does this by asking for donations to make a gold ephod.

The ephod was one of the garments the high priest wore (see Exodus 28 & 39). It had a breastpiece containing two special stones called the Urim and Thummim, that were used to understand God’s will. Although we cannot now be sure just how this was done, they may have been used like dice or casting lots, in 1 Samuel 30 we read how David asked the high priest to bring the ephod so that he could ask God what he should do in a particularly difficult situation.

Gideon makes a gold ephod, so that his home town becomes a place where people come hoping to discover God’s will. In researching this, I could not help speculating further on the social background and wonder if the town had benefited materially by hosting the pagan shrine that Gideon had destroyed and wanted to put something a little more ‘Jewish’ in its place. If he did, then it worked: as we read in the passage at the start of today’s Reflection, all Israel ‘whored’ after the gold ephod in Ophrah! We cannot tell from the text whether this ‘whoring’ was spiritual adultery or sexual immorality but usually one went with the other!

The relevance of this to Christians today is that it does little good to set up alternative idols to mammon – idols such as ‘tithing’ or ‘sowing and reaping’. In and of themselves, tithing and sowing and reaping they are good practices (I wrote about them extensively in the series on Giving & Funding), but they can easily, inadvertently, become idols that give Christians a false sense of security when they act contrary to the standards of behaviour that Jesus described.

I will conclude this thought, and this short series on idolatry in ancient Israel, tomorrow.

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Friday 25 October 2013

An Idol In Israel (5)

Then the men of Israel said to Gideon, ‘Rule over us, you and your son and your grandson also, for you have saved us from the hand of Midian’. Gideon said to them, ‘I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the Lord will rule over you’. … [He] went and lived in his own house.

Now Gideon had seventy sons, his own offspring, for he had many wives. And his concubine who was in Shechem also bore him a son, and he called his name Abimelech. And Gideon the son of Joash died in a good old age and was buried in the tomb of Joash his father, at Ophrah of the Abiezrites.

Judges 8:22-32

Gideon had stuck his neck out to reject idolatry, replace the altar to Baal and Asherah and deliver his country from foreign oppression. Unfortunately, he ended up establishing a new kind of idolatry so that as soon as he died the people turned back to Baal and Asherah!

In return for delivering them from foreign raiders, Israelites not only wanted to make Gideon their king but for him to establish a royal dynasty, so that his sons would rule after him. Gideon refused this offer. At first glance, his reasons seem noble, ‘the Lord will rule over you’, but the truth was that Gideon wanted status, honour and privilege in order to live like a king but without the responsibility.

To have 70 children, Gideon needed to have many wives. Not only was this just like the kings of other nations, and just the sort of behaviour that Israel’s later kings indulged, but it was contrary to the behaviour that Moses set out for any king of Israel. Moses guidance is recorded in Deuteronomy 17:

When you come to the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, ‘I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me’, you may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose… Only he must not acquire many horses for himself… And he shall not acquire many wives for himself, lest his heart turn away, nor shall he acquire for himself excessive silver and gold…

Gideon also accumulated ‘excessive silver and gold’ and other valuable goods and no doubt used some of that wealth to maintain his harem. Moreover, he named one of his sons Abimelech, which means son of a king or father of a king, and which may have also been used as a royal title as well as a personal name.

But worse of all, Gideon made his home town, Ophrah, a centre for worship to rival the Tabernacle that was at Shiloh. He did this by setting up a new kind of idol, one that was recognisably ‘Jewish’ and so probably did not seem like idolatry at all!

I will explain what I mean tomorrow.

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