At the end of Malachi chapter 2, the wicked prosper and the question is asked where is the God of justice? In Malachi chapter 3, the Lord will come to his temple and will refine the people as pure silver and gold. They will shine with righteousness and make offerings that are pleasing to God. The Lord will exercise justice against those who oppress the worker in their wages, the widow, the fatherless, and the stranger. However the Lord is merciful across generations and if the people turn to God, God will also turn towards them.
In the New Testament, Jesus explained how we can turn to God. He emphasized the great commandment of love. To love our neighbor is to love God. We are all to be one with each other and with God in the great commandment. To take care of the sick, the fatherless, the imprisoned, the homeless, and those in need is an act of love towards God. To do acts of righteousness to others is to do those things to the Lord. How we treat the children of God is also how we treat God. To love others, is to love God, is to love ourselves, is to love others, is to love God. The Lord God is One. We are all part of the same human family. We all share the same divine spark. We are in some sense all part of the body of God (as in humanity) or the body of Christ (as in Christ’s kingdom).
Malachi 3:8 then states, “Will a man rob God? Yet he have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings.” How do we rob God? If we help the homeless we are loving God. If we oppress the worker then we are robbing them and by extension also robbing God. If we withhold our riches from the poor then we are withholding blessings from ourselves in different circumstances. Any of us could fall on tough times and find ourselves in difficult circumstances. To love others, is to love ourselves in a different circumstance.
The Lord then commands the people to, “Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it. And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground; neither shall your vine cast her fruit before the time of the field, saith the Lord of hosts.”
The purpose of tithing is to be a social safety net to care for the poor. There is enough food to share, that when it is stored and distributed, we still won’t be able to eat it all. There will be food waste even after sharing and everyone has had their fill. It will be the miracle of Jesus and the loaves and fishes. When we fall on hard times, the storehouse of tithing will be distributed so that we will not go hungry. This is the purpose of tithing. It is to bless the poor so that there will be meat for all. It is to create a society where “all nations shall call you blessed: for ye shall be a delightsome land.”
Malachi concludes by restating that the Lord will make his people like jewels and will have mercy on the people even as a father spares his own son that serves him. When we love the children of God, we love God, and God loves us as his children. The Lord will make the people shine with righteousness. The Lord of justice will then discern between the righteous and the wicked, between the person that serves God (and their neighbor) and those that don’t serve God (and their neighbor) with their tithes and riches. To serve others is to serve God.
For nearly all my life I paid tithes to the church without understanding what tithes were meant for. I was taught that tithes were primarily to run the church rather than primarily intended to bless the poor and to be used as a social safety net. The tithes that I gave to the church were mostly invested in the stock market, land, and businesses with a small fraction used to run the church and even a smaller fraction used to bless others. Some estimates suggest that 80% of tithing donations are invested. Because of this, the LDS church is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. If nothing changes, the church is projected to be valued at over $1 trillion in my lifetime. Hopefully, the church will eventually be shamed by an embarrassment of riches to increase its humanitarian aid.
I no longer pay my tithing to the LDS church, but I am still a full tithe payer to the LDS church. I’ve done the math, and at the end of my life, my contributions to the LDS church will be worth more than 10% of my life earnings, because my donations were reinvested rather than used to bless the poor. It is the same as if I withheld paying my tithing and invested those funds in the stock market until my deathbed, and then withdrew the funds to make a lump sum payment at the end of my life. After nearly a lifetime of paying tithing which mostly goes into investment funds, the interest on those contributions that were invested (rather than paying for the church or blessing the poor) now grows faster than 10% of yearly income.
While we no longer pay tithing to the LDS church, we now give offerings to the local unitarian universalist church that we attend. The local UU church which is the size of an LDS branch, gives more to the local community outside of its walls each year than our entire local LDS stake. They run a local food pantry that freely distributes food to nearly 100 families in the community without preconditions. Each Sunday, donations are received for either the food pantry or other local charities and good causes within the community. Members give what they can out of the generosity of their hearts without needing to do a tithing settlement to see if they have donated enough to be a member in good standing. Rather than focusing the contributions inward within the LDS church, the local UU church focuses its efforts outward to bless the local community. Rather than us vs the world with strict boundary markers, the UU approach dissolves boundaries and expands its borders to be inclusive of others and to actively serve beyond the congregation in the local community. I find that the UU approach to generosity is closer to what is written in Malachi and what Jesus taught. I also hope that the LDS church and the LDS culture will eventually transform to what it could be in blessing the world and expanding its borders rather than mostly looking within. I hope that my contributions to the LDS church will someday be used to bless the poor.
