ARE CHRISTIANS COMMANDED TO TITHE TEN PERCENT?

There is a popular debate circulating in the church on whether a Christian is commanded to tithe 10 percent to his or her local church. Like me, many of you have attended church on Sunday morning & heard the pastor or another respected member of the clergy stand in the pulpit & proclaim that God loves a cheerful giver & that he blesses those who faithfully give to the church to carry out the work of Christian ministry. They also may take it a step further & exclaim how God is also not pleased with the individual who fails to pay tithes. The pastor will usually quote Malachi 3:8-12 in the bible which states 8 “Will a mere mortal rob God? Yet you rob me. “But you ask, ‘How are we robbing you?’ “In tithes and offerings. 9 You are under a curse—your whole nation—because you are robbing me. 10 Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the LORD Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. 11 I will prevent pests from devouring your crops, and the vines in your fields will not drop their fruit before it is ripe,” says the LORD Almighty. 12 “Then all the nations will call you blessed for yours will be a delightful land,” says the LORD Almighty.” These verses are read to the church & then interpreted to mean that if you give your tithes God will shower you with plentiful blessings. But if you do not give 10 percent/tithe of your gross income to the church you are under a curse & God’s blessings will not flow in your life. Now at first glance, this scripture appears to support this belief on tithing.

So to set the stage I want to introduce two very important words that changed my life & the way I studied God’s word. And I am confident that if you apply & understand these two words they will also change how you read & interpret the bible too. The two words are Exegesis & Eisegesis. I’d like to give a quick definition of both. 1) Exegesis is the exposition or explanation of a text-based on a careful, objection analysis. This word means “to lead out of”. That means that the interpreter is led to his conclusion by following the text. On the other hand, the opposite approach to scripture is eisegesis, which is the interpretation of a passage based on a subjective, non-analytical reading. 2) The word eisegesis means “to lead into”, which means the interpreter injects his own ideas into the text, making it mean whatever he wants. So for me, the obvious method I use to study the bible is the first-word Exegesis. But sadly that’s not the approach many pastors take when attempting to interpret scripture to their congregation.

So you may be asking what does Exegesis & eisegesis have to do with the issue of whether we should pay 10 percent to the church. Well, the reason those two words are vitally important is that many people are giving /paying their tithes to their local church based on an eisegesis interpretation of scripture, meaning the pastor or other clergyman are inserting their personal views into the text of God’s word on how you should give money to the church. & because of this many people are giving under compulsion & guilt of God putting a curse on them & at the same time forfeiting their blessings. And unfortunately, many people unnecessarily place this guilt upon themselves due to the pastor falsely using scripture to lure individuals into giving to God in this way. I fell victim to this belief many years ago. & not only me but people have I personally known as well.

Some people will forego paying their mortgage, car note, & phone bill, etc. & give those monies to the church instead because they fear God will curse them & stop their blessings. I even heard a well-known pastor of a church I once attended many years ago say “If you don’t pay your tithes God will cause little mishaps to happen to you like getting a flat tire”. This pastor was trying to say if you don’t pay God 10 percent he will cause little ways for you to lose money. Now in my personal opinion, this was a clever method to guilt a person into always paying 10 percent to the church no matter what. So with that being said let's go back & examine Malachi 3:8-12 carefully. First, let’s get the history of what’s going on in this passage. The context of this passage concerns the Israelites not bringing their offerings to the temple. & because of their disobedience, God had judged them with a small harvest. The Lord challenged them to bring the “full tithe” of grain sacrifices (see Leviticus 6:14-23 for reference) & see that He would bless them with an abundance of future crops. The “storehouse,” mentioned in verse 10, is a place to store grain in the temple. Also to be even more specific those who are guilty of robbing God in Malachi 3:8 are the ministering priest & not the people. This simply means those cursed in Malachi 3:9 are the priests who are cursed for breaking the Old Covenant.

Now let’s go a little bit deeper, many Christians today are not even aware that tithing in the Old Testament was never based on giving physical money. See the tithe was a requirement of the law in which the Israelites were to give 10 percent of the crops they grew & the livestock they raised to the tabernacle/temple. Also here’s another shocking truth to some reading this, the Old Testament Law required multiple tithes- one for the Levites, one for the use of the temple & the feast & one for the poor of the land- which would have pushed the total to around 23.3 percent. So you may be asking how do we know the tithe was based on produce from the land to support the need of the temple? Let’s take a quick look at a few bible verses/passages. The first is Leviticus 27:30, 32 it states “And all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land, or of the fruit of the tree, is the LORD’s. It is holy to the LORD.… And concerning the tithe of the herd, or of the flock, even of whatsoever passes under the rod, the tenth shall be holy to the LORD”.

Deuteronomy 12:17 states “You may not eat within your gates the tithe of your grain, or of your wine, or of your oil.” Deuteronomy 14:22 states “You shall truly tithe all the increase of your seed, that the field Brings forth year by year.”

And the verse to support tithing to the poor is Deuteronomy 26:12 which states “When you have made an end of tithing all the tithes of your increase the third year, which is the year of tithing, and have given it to the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, that they may eat within your gates, and be filled.

So as we see none of those verses speak of anyone paying tithes with physical money. But the real question is why? Well, it’s because only those Israelites who earned a livelihood from farming & herding inside Israel were required to tithe under the Mosaic Law. Their increase came from God’s hand. Those whose increase came from their crafts & skills were not required to tithe products & money. & the poor & needy who did not tithe & received from the tithe gave freewill offerings. I’m going to stop here, but I wanted to first build a solid foundation to build upon to set the stage for the next blog post in which I will expound further on tithing & also explain God’s strategy on how we should properly give in regards to new covenant commands. Also, I will address the most common objection in regards to Old Testament tithes in that Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek before the law found in Genesis 14:18. But I will explain from scripture how that belief is really misinterpreted & how it still doesn’t require New Testament Christians to pay a mandatory 10 percent tithe.