Daily Devotional
"Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. But you say, 'How have we robbed you?' In your tithes and contributions. You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you."
Malachi 3:8-9
On the surface the charge makes no sense. God is sovereign. He is all knowing and all powerful and holds the universe together. “The earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof” (Psalm 24:1). How could a farmer in a small province of the Persian empire possibly steal from him? The question is not naive. It presses on something real, and the answer reframes the entire subject of giving.
What God was owed was not resources but honor. “Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce” (Proverbs 3:9). The tithe was never a transaction meeting a divine need. It was a confession. When an Israelite carried the first portion of the harvest to the storehouse, he was saying out loud with his hands that everything in the field had come from God’s hand first. David prays it directly: “For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you” (1 Chronicles 29:14). Withhold that, and you have not depleted God. You have declared, quietly and functionally, that the harvest was yours.
There is a second theft in view, and it lands on people. Israel’s economy was agrarian; they dealt in crops and cattle, not currency. The tithe was the mechanism by which the Levites, the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow were sustained (Deuteronomy 14:28-29). When God divided the promised land, the priests were deliberately left out: “Therefore Levi has no portion or inheritance with his brothers. The LORD is his inheritance” (Deuteronomy 10:9). That arrangement was designed to be a running, visible sermon on God’s providence, for the priests who lived on it and for the people who supplied it. Nehemiah records what happened when it broke down: the portions were not given, and the Levites abandoned the temple to work their own fields (Nehemiah 13:10). Withholding from God is never a private matter between you and your bank account. It always reaches somebody.
Today's Challenge
If someone reviewed your calendar and your giving for the last three months with no other information about you, what would they conclude you actually believe belongs to God? Where would that picture differ from what you would say out loud?
Prayer
God, you need nothing from me, and yet you are worthy of everything I have. Forgive me for the ways I have handled what is yours as though it were mine, and for how easily I have withheld the honor that costs me something. Make my giving a confession and not a calculation. And where my withholding has quietly starved someone else of care I could have provided, open my eyes to them today. Amen.
