Love is Giving
By Terance Clark August 30, 2025 8 Minute Read
Week 48
This Weeks Passage: Deuteronomy 11:26 – 16:17
(Note: This is part 2 of a series on giving through tithing we began last week related to the passages found in Deuteronomy 11-16. If you missed part 1 please go back and read as it will provide context. You can find the link below.)
Psalms 89:14 Says “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne;” It is the absolute beginning for understanding all that God is and what He is doing and even why He’s doing it. Last week we saw the difference between righteousness and justice. Justice is the rules of law that govern a society, but righteousness is rooted in loving through giving.
Giving is Love
The Hebrew word for love is “hava” and it’s root word “hav” is the word for give. In our culture love is romantic, but in God’s language love is giving. For God so loved that He gave…. Does that sound familiar? To love is to give and when you follow Gods ways you find that whenever He does something, He follows it with an opportunity for us to give. First, He gives, then He gives us an opportunity to give. Beginning in the garden God took six days to create the perfect place for us then He created man and gave him the world and put him in the garden. He then created the opportunity for man to give love back. It’s so like us with our evil inclination to think the tree of knowledge was His endeavor to tempt us. No, it was the opportunity he created to allow man to give back with obedience and trust.
Tzedaka is a combination of giving out of love and giving because it’s the right thing to do. Because God established this mindset within His people loving and giving were interchangeable. To love was to give and to give was to love. Not just as an act of kindness, but a moral responsibility. You see in our culture giving is an act of kindness. We feel good when we give to charity, that makes me a good person, but in Gods kingdom giving is a normal way of life. Giving is not to draw attention to ourselves, but to ensure everyone is cared for. Either way we feel satisfied and accomplished when we have the opportunity to help others. Keep this in mind as it’s a key element missing in the way we give tithes today.
“Loving and giving were interchangeable“
When God established Israel the nation He set it up so that giving was built into the way of life within the community. The priests gave to the nation by providing the means for people to worship the Lord. The people gave to the priests their food so that they would have a source to survive. The priests could not own land they just received from the people. The people couldn’t come before God they needed the priests. The poor were also included within this process and the community was built around the process of supporting this system. Most of the offerings were setup so that when the sacrifices were done they were shared with the poor or shared with others. I’ll cover this in detail next week, but the people never got the best part of the meal they always gave it away. You see how everyone was always thinking about what was best for everyone else and giving was the foundation of the nation. This is God’s way of thinking.
What is Tithing
The original purpose of tithing was to provide food for the poor of the nation. Don’t misunderstand, it wasn’t just a welfare program, it was much more than that. It was a structure that provided a way to make giving a part of society and created a circle of dependency and trust. Deuteronomy 14:22 states that tithing consisted only of crops and not money. The crops were only those grown in Israel which were Wheat, Barley, Oats, Spelt, Rye, grapes for wine and olives for oil, and Gentiles were not required to do it. I’m not saying Gentiles are not to give, I think you can see thus far that giving is a part of Gods nature and should be with us too. What I am trying to uncover is that there has been an underlying pressure put in the church that God’s word says we are cursed or not blessed when we fail to give a certain amount and the truth is we are not obligated to tithe to begin with. Tithing only occurs within Israel according to the scriptures. More on this later.
I know I’m opening up a bunch of stuff here, but give me a few more weeks and I’ll straighten it all out. In our culture we worship wealth and the getting of riches which is more in line with Roman and Greek culture. In the kingdom the pursuit of wealth is considered ungodly and a weight to what really matters in life. The pursuit to know the Lord and His ways is the goal. We see this not only in scripture lived out by the apostles, but in early church writings as well.
“The pursuit to know the Lord and His ways is the goal“
In closing, this week we see that righteousness (tzedaka) is the process of loving through giving and is the balancing piece of justice. Tithing is a part of tzedaka that God established to provide for the priests and the poor and it consisted of very specific crops. Next week we’ll get into the details of tithing and then compare it to what we’ve been taught. Finally we’ll uncover Malachi 3 and see what tithing should look like in our world today. Remember, the goal is to free our hearts to understand what God’s desires are for us so that we can become like Him and that is rooted in a heart that loves to give.
