After Pentecost Devotional - Day 45

“When you lend money to people, you are allowed to keep something of theirs as a guarantee that they will pay back the loan. But don’t take one or both of their millstones, or else they may starve. They need these stones for grinding grain into flour to make bread.” Deuteronomy 24:6

There is much more to the economic instructions in the Bible than we tend to believe. The various principles speak to all sorts of applications, but the general sense is very simple. God desired to protect the weak and poor from oppression by those with power and wealth. God wanted all people to have appropriate access to the resources of the land and the production of wealth.

Specifically here, we see the question of lending addressed. Surety or collateral was deemed as an option to guarantee repayment of a loan, but here we find restrictions. One loaning money could not take as collateral something that would impede the person in need from using the tools of their trade. A millstone could not be taken, as that would mean that grain could not be ground to make flour.

That might seem a little too obvious, as we can easily understand that a worker needs the tools of the trade in order to make repayment on a loan. That is precisely, however, why one loaning money would want to take their tools. The whole point of making one give up a millstone was to force them to default on the loan. It was a strategy designed to use one's circumstances to oppress and take the rest of their resources while feigning assistance and moral superiority.

Loans were supposed to be used to actually help those in need. They were to be acts of generosity, mercy, care, love, and grace. They were supposed to be expressions that one understood the other's needs, expressions of empathy. They were supposed to recognize that the nation as a whole depended on one another and upon Yahweh's grace in order to meet all of their needs. When one had excess, it was to be used to assist any who did not have enough.

The principles were simple. They were predicated on the manner in which Yahweh had led the people out of Egyptian bondage. They were based on the character of Yahweh as the God who had come out of nowhere to redeem Israel. As Yahweh had intervened to assist a people crying for a way out of their desperation, so the nation was to look upon its poor according to the mercy they had experienced under Yahweh's care.

Yahweh had been gracious. They were to be gracious. They were not to deprive one another either in terms of denying a loan to the poor, nor engaging in strategies to take advantage of those will lesser resources and the recourse to protect themselves.

We hear some talk about predatory lending in our nation as the obvious example of how we take advantage of our poorest. That fails to recognize and address, however, that the poor go to predatory lenders because the normal channels for loans are not available to them. Banks lend to the wealthy, while loan sharks prey on the desperate. As a nation, we fail to measure up to Yahweh's economic principles of caring for one another.

Determine what changes God would have you make in your economic attitudes.

"Lord, grant me the courage to see others according to the designs of your grace."

—©Copyright 2016, Christopher B. Harbin

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