The attitude intimated from the Bible is that as creatures we owe all that we have to the Creator. We have nothing that is ours strictly speaking. Our life, whether physical or spiritual, our talents, even the providence of time is all from above. The more men and women consider that the more free they will feel with the resources God in His grace has provided for them. If Jesus did not keep Himself to Himself how much more so do we learn positively from the eight commandment to share and not take that which is not ours. 

There is a consistent concern in the second table of the law that calls all men to recognize the needs of their neighbors over whatever is their own. We know that because that’s what Jesus says in Matthew 22:36-40. It’s also what Moses writes in Leviticus 19:18. The Bible is reliable like that. God in His grace is a witness to all men that we are a part of something bigger than ourselves and we should have the needs and the mind of the community first. If anything is less a part of our mindset today I am not sure what it would be. Everything from our time to our energy to the way we approach life is geared toward me, myself, and I. Watching four or five commercials is all one needs to confirm that thesis. “What’s wrong with you and how can you improve you” is the attitude which overwhelms our culture. In no other place is the chasm greater than when it comes to what we should do with the financial resources the Lord has granted to us in His providence. We hold onto it for dear life, and not without reason. We should be good stewards of the money and goods God in His grace grants.
In our look at the Westminster Larger Catechism this morning we are going to hear some pushback from the Divines that will require listening as it goes directly against the American way of life in some important ways. Get ready to find some humility.
Here are the two Questions and Answer’s for today:
Q. 140: Which is the eighth commandment?
A. The eighth commandment is, Thou shalt not steal.
Q. 141: What are the duties required in the eighth commandment?
A. The duties required in the eighth commandment are, truth, faithfulness, and justice in contracts and commerce between man and man; rendering to everyone his due; restitution of goods unlawfully detained from the right owners thereof; giving and lending freely, according to our abilities, and the necessities of others; moderation of our judgments, wills, and affections concerning worldly goods; a provident care and study to get, keep, use, and dispose these things which are necessary and convenient for the sustentation of our nature, and suitable to our condition; a lawful calling, and diligence in it; frugality; avoiding unnecessary lawsuits and suretyship, or other like engagements; and an endeavour, by all just and lawful means, to procure, preserve, and further the wealth and outward estate of others, as well as our own.
Whenever we begin to ask the question about what a law of God requires of us we need to do two things immediately: 1) What do we know about the character of our Lord that would inform our understanding? 2) Why is it good for me and my friends that I heed the call?
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What is most incredible is that God enters into our groans with us. In the Garden of Getsemane, Jesus “was troubled” and prayed “in agony” to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt 26, Lk 22). On the cross, Jesus cries out David’s words in Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Mt 27:46). He groans for himself and he groans with us.

Spine: that’s the technical word for the pointy things that come out of cacti. Most Arizonans use more colloquial expressions like prickers or stickers when referencing them. Either way, they’re nothing to laugh at. If you’ve lived in the Sonoran desert for any length of time, you’ve used a pair of tweezers to yank them from your skin.
After my parents moved to Tucson, my grandfather visited from Florida. Amazed by the beautiful and seemingly soft “fur” covering prickly pear cacti, he stroked the apparently innocuous fuzz. The prickly pear gifted him with a few hundred spines that pierced his fingertips. He groaned.
Recently I was doing some yard work and got too close to a saguaro’s spine as I tried to weed around the base of the cactus. The spine pierced my fingernail. I groaned.
It has remained lodged there for over two months. Initially located at the base of my fingernail, it was impossible to remove without taking off my entire fingernail. The fingernail itself now holds the tip of the spine against the flesh under my fingernail. It’s a tiny amount of pain, but pain that will not leave. I groan.
There is a surprising amount of groaning in the Bible. In Exodus, we hear the groans of the Israelites in their enslavement, “During those many days the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God” (Ex 2:23). In the days of the judges, the Israelites groaned. David and other psalmists groan throughout the Psalms.
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In this booklet, Dr. Beisner does not start with ideas from the Social Justice Movement and move from there to God and His Word. Instead, he first understands Scripture as sufficient and authoritative, and uses it to evaluate the Social Justice Movement. In that way, he accurately shows what God and His Word say about the Social Justice Movement, avoiding what the Social Justice Movement says about God and His Word.

In 2018, Dr. E. Calvin Beisner published Social Justice vs. Biblical Justice: How Good Intentions Undermine Justice and Gospel. In his usual scholarly fashion, Beisner analyzes the arguments of the social justice movement that have become especially popular in the last decade.
After Beisner covers what some Christians say is a Biblical principle on wealth redistribution and equalization, with short sections on The Sabbatical Year Law (p. 12), The Jubilee Year Law (14), the sharing of goods at the church in Jerusalem (15), and the Pauline collections for believers who were suffering famine (17), Beisner gives the Biblical definition of justice and the Biblical way it is to be carried out.
Dr. Beisner is especially careful to avoid eisegesis, “making Scripture align with his own thoughts,” and exegetes, “making his own thoughts align with Scripture,” what the Bible says about justice. He shows four Biblical criteria for justice (20-23).

Justice requires impartiality and equal application.
Justice requires rendering to each his due.
Justice requires proportionality between acts and rewards or punishments.
Justice requires conformity to the standard God set forth in His law.

These four things imply that a person has rights. Beisner distinguishes negative “rights against harm” from positive “rights to certain benefits” (23). “Properly understood, rights are not guarantees that something will be provided for us but guarantees that what is ours will not be unjustly taken from us. That is, properly speaking, rights are not positive but negative” (24-25). That means, in the case of a positive right, there is no way of knowing what a person has any right to. Different eras and different geographic locations present differing needs. If a person has a right to food and clothing, how much food would a person have a right to? And what kind of clothes? And if a person has such “positive rights,” how can those rights be provided for without violating another person’s “negative rights”? A person’s right not to have their possessions taken from them, whether it be food, clothing, or money to buy things, must be trampled upon if other persons have positive rights. Beisner shows that “positive rights” are not Biblical rights.
In the next section Beisner gives the Biblical prescription for five types of justice: Commercial, vindicative, retributive, punitive, and remedial.
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