TITHING: Our position on tithing is straightforward and simple. We do not think this is a difficult or obscure teaching in the Bible. What can we learn about the religious leaders in Jesus day regarding money? One obvious lesson is that they were savvy about getting it! The Sadducees were responsible for running the Temple, and they had turned it into a money-making machine. The Temple was big business in Jerusalem, and the Sadducees were “lovers of money.” Keep in mind that the Biblical tithe was meant to support the Levites. (The tithe was their “portion” in the Land.) The Sadducees collected the tithe, but they went further by selling sacrificial animals and charging a percentage for exchanging currency – all this on Temple grounds!
Application: We think it’s fair to say the institutional church teaches tithing with a similar motive – wealth (real property assets). What other reason could there possibly be? The tithe is dead center in the Mosaic Law, and though these same churches insist we are not under the Law, they still manage to enforce tithing! Few see the contradiction, and fortunately no one is sacrificing animals! We’d like to point this out as evidence of spiritual blindness. Tithing is for the nation of Israel, and it was needed to support the Levites and the Temple. The church was never intended to be a building, because the Temple of God is now the physical body of believers. There is no place in the church for a tithe in the Biblical sense. Said differently, we are all priests of God, and Jesus instructed us to care for one another as a family. The notion of a NT tithe only works if the church is viewed as a decentralized network of buildings (property ownership, salaries, and mortgages).
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