Give all, plus twenty percent more

March 2nd, 2009

Today's Reading: Numbers 5-6 and Acts 16

There seems to be this idea in the Bible of how to treat someone that you wronged. Apparently, if you steal from someone, you are supposed to give it back, along with a fifth of what it is worth. So, if you stole one hundred dollars, you’d have to give that back with twenty of your own.

Of course, someone who steals one hundred dollars probably didn’t have twenty dollars of their own in the first place, so how is it that they can properly restore the one that they have wronged? Back then, the only way was to literally sell yourself as property.

Isn’t it amazing that we all start out with nothing but what our parents give us, and after we “leave the nest”, most of us start with nothing once more. (Especially since some of us come from homes where our parents fail us, and then we make it worse by borrowing money at high interest rates for financial aid for college.)

My point is that if God demands that we make restitution by restoring all plus twenty percent, where does He expect that twenty percent to come from, exactly? We can’t just pull it out of the air.

That’s God for you, giving us a standard that is always higher than us, so we have to learn to fly in order to get it. I suppose it wouldn’t be a miracle if that wasn’t the case.

It reminds me of a scene from the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where the slave-owner’s family was discussing a lesson they learned in church about how slavery is all just and right. The slave-owner, who didn’t believe in God, stated that “if I wanted to believe in that, I would believe in something above me, not below me”.

That isn’t an exact quote, as it’s been a while since I read Miss Stowe’s work. The point is that we can’t assume that human goodness is enough. There will always be a little extra “umph” required to make us godly, otherwise all we are doing is striving to be human, which is hardly an uphill climb.

Athletes always talk about giving their one hundred (insert number to make the value higher than one hundred here) percent. There is of course no way this can be done, and is another reason why I hate sports clichés like this. I guess what they are trying to say is that in order to do something amazing, they have to be more than they can be. To push it beyond the limit, as it were.

It really is impossible without Christ.