Apostle Don Meares
Separated and consecrated unto Him. It belongs to Him.
What are you supposed to do if you’ve done this? You are now under the New Covenant because you can repent on the spot and come under the blessing of God again immediately. You need to repent for God to cancel the debt.
The tithe is always something that is devoted to destruction
This is something Christian’s don’t always get. The tithe is always devoted to destruction. Every tenth, whether in money, crops, or cattle, belongs to God. If you’re going to offer a blind bull instead of a good bull, in principle, you cannot redeem the tithe. You cannot change what you’re supposed to tithe. If you give God something defective, you’ll lose double. God doesn’t inflate you. So you’re going to lose twice as much. Plus, you’ve taken something God wanted and didn’t sacrifice it. So if you don’t give the tithe, you’ll be charged interest and in all kinds of trouble.
Robbing God
Look at Joshua 7:10-26. Achan was a man who was told like every other person in the household of faith that when you go into the Promised Land, the very first city is to be the first fruit unto God. First fruit is always a tithe. This is the first city of all the cities that you go to. So every city, you can have all the spoils of each city. But when it comes to the first city—Jericho—it belongs to God. So all the people of Israel under Joshua didn’t touch anything in Jericho. It has been devoted to destruction; this is why everything had to be killed and burnt in the city of Jericho because it is a tithe. A tithe is devoted to destruction.
Achan comes up, gets greedy, and takes a Babylonian garment. He took a wedge of gold and a wedge of silver and hid them. These were in the city, and Achan hid them in secret. But then, 36 people in God’s army were killed during battle. When Joshua goes into prayer, God tells Him about what Achan has done, which God accounted for the whole of Israel. Achan has touched what belongs to God, and Israel had to suffer for it.
When you rob God, you are doing physical harm and injury. Any spirit on planet Earth has to be here legally. You have to possess a body. We are now the Body of Christ. In Joshua’s day, the children of Israel were His body. When somebody robs God, he does God’s body harm. There are major crises that can happen in your life because of what someone sitting behind you, in front of you, or beside you, did.
Execrate vs. Consecrate
Malachi 3:9 says:
“You are cursed with a curse,
For you have robbed Me,
Even this whole nation.”
Another principle is that when you don’t bring the tithe, you become cursed. You are execrated. Execrate is the opposite of consecrate. It is to invoke evil. So when you curse yourself because you rob God not just in the tithe but in the offerings, you bring a curse upon yourself. You are invoking evil to come. It’s not God who brings the curse upon you. It’s yourself. You also bring this curse upon the people around you.
Proverbs 3:9 says:
“Honor the Lord with your possessions,
And with the firstfruits of all your increase;”
The word “honor” means to mark a place. It goes with the principle of the tithe. The connotation is that if you mark a place and dig a hole, God will fill it for you. In our case today, if you honor the Lord, you mark something with your money. You honor the Lord with your possessions, the first fruit of your increase. The tithe belongs to God no matter where you hide it.
Going back to the Garden of Eden
Life in God’s Garden
“The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed. 9 And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it parted and became four riverheads.” –Genesis 2:8-10
“Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’” – Genesis 2:15-17
When Adam and Eve disobey God, He doesn’t curse them. He curses the ground. What happened here is that Adam obeyed his wife instead of God’s instruction. When your spouse tells you to do something against God’s Word, husbands and wives, don’t do it. When people in authority tell us to disobey God’s Word, we shouldn’t follow them, no matter who they are. God is the ultimate authority that we must listen to.
What God is trying to give to Adam by principle is the understanding of their relationship. The problem with a. lot of people is once they start getting authority, once they start having dominion, they begin to think that they’ve done this all by themselves. This is not true for the Bible says it is God who gives us the power to get wealth (Deuteronomy 8:18). When we set apart the tithe, we do this in remembrance and in acknowledgment that all we have is because of God. We have to always remember that God is our authority.
If we can do what God tells us to do, He will put us in charge of many things. Our faithfulness will open us up to a fruitful harvest. God will bless us because He has seen that He is first in our lives as we bring what He has asked us to steward to Him.
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