Do Not Steal
A woman walked into a butcher’s shop years ago and told the man she needed a fryer for supper. He was glad because he only had one chicken left to sell and was glad to get rid of it. He pulled it out of the ice and put it on the scale. “Two and a half pounds,” he said. “Hmm, I really need one a little bigger,” she said. So the butcher took the bird off the scale, rummaged it around in the ice behind the counter, and then weighed it again, pushing down just a bit on the back of the scale. “Three pounds!” he said. “Hmmm,” the lady replied. “I guess I’ll take both of them.”
Busted! Just like I was when I was 9 years old or so and I rode my bike down to Old Town Shopping Center where I knew the Ben Franklin store had my favorite candy. I stuffed my pockets full and walked out, heart pounding, and had almost made it to my bike when I heard the manager say, “Stop right there, young man.” It ended badly, with a call to my parents, a tearful confession to the manager, and then a painful lesson administered by Dad back at the house.
With the 8th commandment, God demands honesty in how we are to love our neighbors. Do not murder and do not commit adultery are minimum standards for loving them, right? But so is not stealing from them or being false in our dealings with them. Seems obvious, yes? If you ask 50 people on the street if they believe stealing is wrong, probably close to 50 would agree. Ask the same 50 if they had ever stolen something, and many would say “no.” According to Barna research, nearly 90 percent of evangelical Christians claim they never break this commandment. I think Martin Luther’s statement is closer to the truth. He said, “If we look at mankind in all its conditions, it is nothing but a vast, wide stable full of great thieves.”
The US Dept. of Commerce reports that 4 million people are caught shoplifting every year and for everyone who is caught, 35 are not caught. That means there are nearly 140 million incidents of shoplifting in the U.S. every year. And what makes that even more shocking is that based on the numbers, 90% of shoplifters who are caught are classified as middle class or wealthy. People also steal from the government by under-reporting taxes. Or from insurance companies with fraudulent claims. People steal intellectual property or violate copyrights or plagiarize in books or papers. People steal from their employer if they don’t put in a full day’s work.
People even steal from God. What? God said it Himself. “Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me.” The people He was speaking to didn’t believe it, and said, “How? How have we robbed you?” God said, “In your tithes and contributions.” Earlier in the book of Malachi, God said the priests had offered their lame or sick animals on the altar as a sacrifice to Him. It reminded me of the story Paul Harvey told about a woman who was cleaning out her freezer and found a Butterball Turkey that had been in there 23 years. She called the Butterball Turkey hotline and asked if the turkey was still edible. They said if it had been in zero degrees for 23 years it was still edible, but it would taste like cardboard and should just be thrown away. She said, “Oh, no that’s ok. I will give it to the church.”
At its root, stealing is a refusal to trust in God’s providence. When we steal, we are saying to God that we do not believe He will give us everything we need. We might think, I have to take care of myself by hook or by crook, with the emphasis on crook. But the Lord said, “Do not steal.”
Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” We don’t say that prayer and then sit on the front porch and wait for someone to drive by the house and sling a loaf of bread in the yard. Nor do we pray that prayer and drive to Food Lion and steal our groceries for the day. We trust in God’s providence by working hard in the strength He gives us, and we earn what we need to live.
Don’t steal. And check that turkey carefully at the next church potluck!