10 for Ten (7)
This is only a partial list of the countless ways people violate the eighth commandment. They pilfer public property, stealing supplies from hospitals, building sites, and churches. In fact, one hotel reported in its first year of business having to replace 38,000 spoons, 18,000 tiles, 355 coffee pots … and 100 Bibles!
Citizens steal from the government by underpaying their taxes or making false claims for disability and Social Security. The government steals too. With its huge bureaucracy, the federal government commits theft on a national scale by wasting public money and by accumulating debt without fully planning to repay. Deficit spending is really a way of stealing from future citizens.
There is also theft at work. Employees fill in false time cards and call in sick when they want a day off. They help themselves to office supplies, make long-distance phone calls, and pad their expense accounts. Sometimes they go so far as to embezzle, but a more common workplace theft is simply failing to put in a full day’s work. Instead, workers idle away their time, sitting in their offices and surfing the Internet, sending e-mail to friends—even playing computer games. Whenever we give anything less than our best effort, we are robbing our employer of the productivity we owe.
I. God’s Law
The Hebrew word for stealing (ganaf) literally means to carry something away, as if by stealth. To give a more technical definition, to steal is to appropriate someone else’s property unlawfully.
Ganaf—stealing—covers all conventional types of theft: burglary (breaking into a home or building to commit theft); robbery (taking property directly from another using violence or intimidation); larceny (taking something without permission and not returning it); hijacking (using force to take goods in transit or seizing control of a bus, truck, plane, etc.); shoplifting (taking items from a store during business hours without paying for them); and pickpocketing and purse-snatching. The term ganaf also covers a wide range of exotic and complex thefts … [such as] embezzlement (the fraudulent taking of money or other goods entrusted to one’s care). There is extortion (getting money from someone by means of threats or misuses of authority), and racketeering (obtaining money by any illegal means).
II. God’s Reason
III. God’s People
What the Bible means by ownership is not possessing things to use for our own purposes, but receiving things from God to use for his glory. So at the same time that we are forbidden to take things that don’t belong to us, we are required to use what we have in ways that are pleasing to our God. To put it very simply, the eighth commandment isn’t just about stealing—it’s also about stewardship.