Stephen
Terry, Director
Violating
the Spirit of the Law
Commentary
for the November 2, 2019 Sabbath School Lesson
So
I continued, "What you are doing is not right. Shouldn't you walk in the fear
of our God to avoid the reproach of our Gentile enemies? I and my brothers and
my men are also lending the people money and grain. But let us stop charging
interest! Give back to them immediately their fields, vineyards, olive groves
and houses, and also the interest you are charging them - one percent of the
money, grain, new wine and olive oil."
"We
will give it back," they said. "And we will not demand anything more from them.
We will do as you say." Nehemiah 5:9-12, NIV
In Nehemiah, chapter 5, we are of a situation all too
familiar to us today. The Jewish people, faced with taxes and the additional
burden of interest on their debts, were driven to the point of losing their
land and their children to the money lenders. Of course there are some
differences. 2,500 years ago, the economy was primarily agrarian, so the loss
of land could mean the loss of any opportunity to provide for oneself and one's
family. It often resulted in either enslavement to those who held the debt or
life as a criminal, stealing to survive. Typically, in order to prevent loss of
the land, the children would be sold into slavery first. Of course the loss of
their labor could make tending the crops and bringing in the harvest more
difficult, but they were often deemed more dispensable than the land. We still
see this today in impoverished third-world countries. Eventually if the landowner
could not repay the debt and interest, the property would also be gone and the
owner and his wife could also end up enslaved. While the taxes could often not
be avoided since they were handed down by a distant and indifferent government,
the interest charges were more local and therefore more personal as well as malleable,
depending on the compassion of the lender.
The interest charged by the Jewish money lenders would likely
not be considered exorbitant today. It was a monthly collection of 1 percent of
the debt each month or 12 percent interest per year. The Gentiles were charging
one another as much as 50 percent, so the 12 percent figure might, even then,
have been seen as low and even reasonable based on the risk the money lender
was assuming. The fact that all parties seemed comfortable with the arrangement
would support that perspective. Those who complained about the situation to
Nehemiah did not apparently focus on the interest charges as being unfair, but
rather decried the loss of lands and children to the lenders.
As I mentioned there are some similarities in our situation
today, as well as some stark differences. Many modern families have lost their
homes due to predatory lending practices based on variable interest rates that allow
those who might not qualify otherwise to get into homes with a much lower up
front cost, only to lose those homes later when the interest rates rise.
Another predatory practice is to offer low-income homebuyers financing of a
lower amount with a scheduled "balloon" payment for the balance. Then
if they cannot come up with a contracted balloon payment because they either do
not have the money or cannot find a lender willing to finance that balance,
they lose their home. Of course, once they are out of their home, they find
that things are not necessarily better without the mortgage hanging over their
heads. Landlords paying the high mortgage payments on rental properties must
charge high monthly rental payments to potential renters in order to prevent
their own loss of property. As a result, those who have lost their homes find
themselves squeezed between the mortgage payments that put them on the street
and the high rental payments that tend to keep them there. The growing homeless
population on our city streets bears evidence of this problem. But this is not the
only economic trap.
Even those who remain in their homes and are able to
make the mortgage payment each month are subject to predatory lending practices.
One of the worst is easy store revolving credit cards financed by banks
incorporated in states that make usurious interest rates legal in order to
attract the business of those banks. With some cards now approaching 30 percent
interest, it is easy to become quickly buried under an insurmountable mountain of
debt. Those who have managed to maintain a good credit history may have the
option of bill consolidation loans that will allow them to renegotiate for a
much smaller interest rate and perhaps a smaller overall payment. But not
everyone has a good credit history due to job changes, medical emergencies,
etc. For them, the debt becomes a nightmare enslavement that they may never
escape due to an inability to pay more than the minimum payment allowed by the lender.
Bankruptcy may be their only out. Of course, the result of that is the lender's
felt need to offset the risk of personal bankruptcies by their borrowers with
ever higher interest rates, perpetuating the destructive cycle.
Another trap is the student loan system. Lenders are
eager to loan to college students because unlike mortgage debt and revolving
store credit, the debt usually cannot be discharged by bankruptcy. With soaring
college costs, those debts can quickly rival the cost of a mortgage and make it
almost impossible for young families to own their own home. Long touted as the
American dream as seen in movies like Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful
Life," and largely made possible by the post war boom in the savings and
loan industry which facilitated the construction and purchase of homes with
lower down payments and low interest rates, the idea of home ownership is becoming
more and more distant for those trying to navigate the landscape of credit
traps we now have.
In Nehemiah's day, government and religion were often
intertwined. In spite of all the problems that can arise for those wishing
freedom of worship under such a system, it allowed Nehemiah an advantage not
enjoyed by secular rulers now. He was able to appeal to the tenets of the
Jewish faith as he sought relief for those trapped by the money lenders. The
system set up in the Pentateuch after the Exodus forbade the charging of
interest on loans made by one Jew to another.[i] Those who had returned
from exile were nonetheless charging the 12 percent mentioned above. When
Nehemiah called them back to the command regarding the practice, they could not
refute it and agreed to stop the practice. Apparently, even Nehemiah had
overlooked this command and agreed to cease charging interest in the future either
by himself or his men. Furthermore, although he could not set aside the demands
of the Persian Empire for their tax levies, he chose not to levy assessments
for supporting his governorship on the people in order to lessen their burdens.
Modern, secular governments do not have the option of
appealing to religious decrees. They can only appeal to the legal requirements established
by their governments. Too often those governments have been corrupted by the greed
of those who refuse to bring about meaningful reforms that would help the poor,
with government figures being tempted by a share of the profits offered by the
money lenders to secure favorable governmental action or, in the absence of
that, governmental indifference to the plight of the poor. But this usually
does not bar those who can personally appeal to faith-based responses to the
problem. For instance, in spite of what their governments may do, Muslims have
a system of banking that foregoes usury based on the same counsel given in the
Pentateuch. Christians may do the same, but have been weakened in doing so by
two personal choices made long ago. The first is to see the pursuit of wealth
as a pre-eminent focus of the Christian faith. Those who do this tend to see
any resulting wealth as an endorsement by God and a granting of divine favor
for pursuing the correct path. An obvious iteration of that theologically is
proclaimed by those who preach Prosperity Theology to huge audiences that will
send them the few dollars they have to spare and thereby provide these
preachers with high incomes and magnificent mansions, automobiles and aircraft.
Then these preachers point to these things their gullible followers have enabled
as evidence that God rewards those on the right path, the pursuit of wealth.
Greed replaces compassion, and indifference replaces empathy toward the poor
with this ersatz theology.
The second belief that compromises our compassion toward
the needy is the belief that the negation of works-oriented righteousness by
Pauline righteousness by faith as exemplified in his epistles to the Romans and
Galatians means that we no longer have any need to consider the commands of the
Old Testament as obligatory. Seventh-day Adventists come up against this attitude
continually over our honoring of the seventh-day Sabbath established at
Creation. Because it was also enshrined in the Decalogue, many claim it is
obsolete. Strangely, they apply this to the Sabbath but not to murder, stealing
or adultery which are also enshrined in the same legal document. Perhaps we
would do well to question whether or not the baby ended up being tossed with
the bath water in our understanding of righteousness by faith. Even James, in
his epistle, questioned the legitimacy of our becoming so faith focused that compassion
falls by the way. He felt that our faith should be demonstrated by our
compassion rather than distinct from it.[ii]
In the face of corrupted governmental authority and the secular
state, we have an opportunity to demonstrate the character of Christ in our
response to the enslavement of many caught in the credit traps of today. Like
Nehemiah, we can take positive action in spite of the prevailing current. As a
denomination, we once preached a vibrant health message and were one of the
leading forces against the poisonous effects of tobacco usage with our
effective "Five-day Plan to Stop Smoking." As tobacco use plummeted,
such programs were not as much in demand in the United States as they once
were, but now this new and pernicious threat of unrestrained usury and economic
slavery cries out for a response from those who should be founts of compassion
and mercy. Maybe it is time that we, like those Jewish nobles of Nehemiah's
day, began to question our own pursuit of wealth and power at the expense of
others. Why do we not help others escape the very traps that we ourselves may
be profiting from either through our investments or our own business practices?
Maybe it is time for reform of both personal and corporate Christianity. God is
not indifferent to the suffering our failure to reform may cause.[iii]
