The Practice of Stewardship

The all-inclusive expansion of "the ever­lasting gospel," known and loved by the Advent people as the threefold message, is intrinsically bound up with the tremendous fact of the divine Personality who is the Creator of all. This means and involves so much that we might well pause briefly and ponder its sweeping implications.

Former Editor, "The Ministry" Magazine

"Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters." Revelation 14:7.

THE all-inclusive expansion of "the ever­lasting gospel," known and loved by the Advent people as the threefold message, is intrinsically bound up with the tremendous fact of the divine Personality who is the Creator of all. This means and involves so much that we might well pause briefly and ponder its sweeping implications. Every foundational precept, promise, prophecy, or principle existent throughout the universe is but the outshining of His immutable will. These are not arbitrary, but spring inevitably out of our basic relation­ship to Him. Every binding responsibility of man to God, or man to man, has its roots therein.

Every general truth, and each particular application of truth for special periods of human history, is simply the inevitable out­growth of this fundamental relationship existent between the Creator and His crea­tures. And this is preeminently true to­day. As we approach the consummation of the plan of redemption, the acceptance and operation of every phase of this transcendent relationship is a necessary pre­liminary. A complete message and a perfected people is God's objective, and will be the natural result.

Stewardship Lies at the Heart and Center of Our Message

Now let us apply these general principles. The admission that God made everything carries with it the admission that He is the sovereign Lord and the owner of everything. This logically implies, next, our stewardship and accounting of what He has committed to our keeping. And this, in turn, demands an acknowledgment upon our part in the precise way the sovereign Owner has determined, which is through the tithe. This logical sequence is inescapable.

Thus we see that stewardship lies at the very heart and center of our whole message. This is to be expected, for anything touching the relationship of Creator and created beings that is fundamentally true has a vital relation to everything else that is true—and pre-eminently so in this last-day recovery of neglected or forgotten truths.

So, in the triple expansion of the un­changed and unchangeable gospel for the hour, as recorded in Revelation 14, emphasis is thrown on (1) The Judgment— which brings the scrutiny of the Eternal upon our relationship to God as stewards; (2) The Fall of Babylon—because of abuses fostered by the promulgation of her wrong concepts; and (3) The Mark of the Beast—which is a thrust at God's creatorship, hence His ownership, and conse­quently our relationship and supreme accountability to Him.

Sabbath and Tithe Not Repealed or Abrogated

Time and money are two of God's most valuable gifts to man. But in both, God holds a designated reservation. There is holy time and there is holy money—the Sabbath and the tithe. Both are to be fully restored in the remnant message, for these twin institutions connote the same author­ity, and touch the same principle. Both have the same impregnable foundation. Both run parallel through the ages. Both are devoted in a special sense to God. Neither has been repealed or abrogated. Both hold as surely as man's foundational relationships to God hold, for their obligation is fundamental and eternal. And as inseparable last-day tests of character for God's remnant people, they are consequently of keenest interest and special significance to Seventh-day Adventists.

This discovery of God, and our relation to Him as the "Supreme Person in a world of persons," is the greatest thought that can enter the human mind. From it spring all our recognized truths. It is the basis for righteousness by faith, which is our "message in verity^" To it we bow with reverential awe, accepting it as the polestar of our lives. In view, then, of the acknowl­edged fact of God in Creation, the vital issue is human stewardship for God, or assumed ownership and independence of God. For if man's vaunted claims of ownership are valid, then the very foundation of God's sovereignty is denied.

To the Seventh-day Adventist, Jehovah is not a philosophical conception, but is the personal and living God, whom shortly we are to meet face to face. The modern­ist's pernicious doctrine of divine imma­nence is no more than mystic pantheism. It has nothing to do with the true indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. In its logical ultimate it denies the personality of God. Against it the threefold message stands as a mighty protest and a towering bulwark. So to the one vast issue we address ourselves.

The principle of stewardship throws man back on God, who is in this way established in his consciousness. God is made real. And this reality of the Unseen restores God to His rightful place from which He has been displaced through Babylonish apostasy. It enthrones Him again in the daily life as Lord. Thus the tithe emerges from a mercenary basis to the expressed relation of man to the Supreme Being and His kingdom. This should be a basic element in stressing the spiritual revival and reformation that God is seeking to bring to His people. It surely embraces a revival of Christian stewardship and a reformation in the consecration of ourselves and our possessions to Him. Like its related truths, it is destined to have rightful place in the loud cry of the message.

God Retains His Title as Owner

Let us now go back for a historical view of that awesome hour of Creation, when "in the beginning God created." This is the most sublime and all-comprehensive statement in the Old Testament. It is the basic introduction of all inspiration. It is the foundation truth on which all truths must be built. The Creator is still God over all He has made, or else He is the creature of our imaginations. Sooner or later we all seek some explanation of life. We attempt to discover the divine purpose behind things seen and expressed.

The implications of stewardship alone satisfy. Men are not owners; they are but stewards of entrusted possessions and in­comes—unless God be dead or has moved out of the universe. So long as Creator and creatures exist, these mutual relationships are, in the very nature of things, inescapable. God has not sold out. He still retains His title to all creation.

The story of Eden is majestic and deep in its meaning. Since man was made from the dust of the ground, he was therefore God's creation and hence His by this right. Man was placed in the Garden to dress it, but God still owned it. Man never owned a single foot of it. God had a divine plan for primeval humanity. This was to "subdue" all things and "have dominion" over them. To man, God gave the major portion of the fruits, but reserved a portion for Himself, to remind our first parents of His ownership and as a test of their loyalty.

God reserved His proprietary rights by forbidding them to eat of the one tree. He thereby established a principle, growing out of this new relationship. So at the birth of the race God put the stamp of His ownership and the responsibility of man's accountability or stewardship upon all things. God drew a line on one tree and said, "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The destiny of the race depended on the perpetual recognition of God's sovereignty.

God didn't need the fruit, for He says, "If I were hungry, I would not tell thee" (Ps. 50:12). But Adam and Eve needed constantly to recognize their accountability. Alas, through an evil influence, they were led to take from God's portion; and all the universe knows the consequences.

Our First Parents Defaulted in Trust

Some say the taking of the fruit was too trivial a matter for such an infinite issue. But nothing on earth could be more important or fundamental—important not because of the quantity of the fruit, but because of the basic principle involved. Our first parents violated the established, foundation principle of all relationship between the Creator and creature. They failed in trust and appropriated that which belonged to another. Adam didn't take much, but he thereby broke that relationship. The act was an attempt to rob God of His rights, so man was driven out of the garden of plenty because he took of the portion God had reserved for Himself. Thus the story of Creation presents the first revelation of God's ownership, with its inevitable corollary, man's stewardship.

Then God set about the task of gathering up the wreckage of Eden. He started again, with man under the handicap of sin, to work out His eternal purposes. And the tithe may well be said to occupy the place of the fateful tree as the material test of stewardship since Eden. It is God's reservation. The principles involved are identical. The issues are just as deep and vital. Beware! The devil is up to the same old tricks, simply with a different "tree." Vio­lation of trust will bring the same tragic results, but the resultant death will be eternal instead of temporal. Just as Eve saw that the tree was desirable to make one wise and was good for food, so multitudes today desire to use God's tithes for food, for education, or for gratification of self. Again, I say, Beware!

Four hundred years before the revela­tion of the law at Sinai, God found in Abraham, the loftiest character of all antiquity, one who felt a sense of stewardship. There was as yet no written law, no statutory compulsion, no ecclesiastical authority, to enforce his payment of tithes to Melchizedek, as recorded in Genesis 14:18-20. But he had no need to be instructed. He already knew the obligation. The incident is related with such directness that it is evident he lived under the clear knowledge and conviction that the Most High is the "possessor," and that the tenth belongs to Him. Who taught him the obligation of the tithe? Ah, he had knowledge of a prior, unwritten, common, fundamental law.

Divine Ownership Recognized Through All Ages

Then, 153 years later, we come to Jacob, as depicted in Genesis 28:10-22. Note that he said, "Of all that thou shalt give me"— recognition of divine ownership—"I will surely give the tenth unto thee." Wasn't that a strange vow? Why the tenth, instead of an eighth or an eleventh? Ah, he also knew the revealed will and provisions of God. It was no coincidence that Abraham and his grandson Jacob both paid the same designated tithe. Thus stewardship was in operation in the patriarchal dispensation. The world is today slowly coming to the decimal system. Yet it is not a modern in­vention. It goes back to Genesis and the truth of the tithe.

The practice of offering a tenth is so ancient and so universal that it must have had an authoritative commencement. Its practice was common among practically all the ancient civilizations. It is coeval with the race and as widespread as the old clay tablets indicate. There are records of tithing among Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Ethiopians, Arabians, Greeks, Romans, and Carthaginians. Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Xenophon mention it. Demosthenes said: "It is sacrilege to retain the tenth." The simple fact is, it had a common origin that antedated paganism.

  The obligation, as known, obviously rested on God's common law for the entire race rather than upon recorded or written statutory regulation. So it was also with the Sabbath in Eden. The written code came twenty-five centuries later. There are certain other duties that the Bible recognizes as orally understood from the beginning, yet without mention of their origin or ini­tial announcement. The tithe is taken for granted as a known duty, just like the in­stitution of prayer, also applicable and needful in all dispensations and for all lands and races. Clearly the tithe rests on a universal principle, and the knowledge of this universal principle has penetrated and persisted even in the devout pagan cults; for this sense of divine ownership was recognized from the very beginning. This dedicated tenth was the logical signification of stewardship, and this, in turn, of the great fact of God.

(To be continued)

 


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Former Editor, "The Ministry" Magazine

July 1960

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