God - a giver or a taker?

As we begin a conversation about giving and offerings, we have to be able to answer this question: Is God a giver or a taker?  If God is demanding, requiring, taking from us, then offerings will be difficult, painful, and hard to give. We will give them with a duplicitous heart because we’re holding something back for ourselves.  We’re giving with tight fists (when God told his people to give with open hands); then, we’re not giving with a single-mindedness.

Is God a giver or a taker?  All gods of this world, all gods that men have created are takers.  Mammon is a taker.  Ecclesiastes explains how Mammon and the pursuit of stuff is a taker.  It takes our every waking moment to gather it; it takes our every waking moment of desiring it; it takes every moment so that we don’t really get to enjoy it; and then, sometimes, it takes what we have away (think of recession - so many people thought that they had made it when things were good; they bought houses bigger than their wallets and those houses were taken from them.  Every god of every false religion is the same.

We can’t walk through this discussion without realizing that God's law does make demands of us.  To the one man who worshipped Mammon and found in that god is joy and pleasure, God demanded his life.  “This very night your life will demanded of you?  Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself” (Lk 12:20).  And in that sense, God is a taker.  

But is he really?  Is he really asking anything of us?  No, because it’s all his to begin with.  Everything that we are and have is his.  “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Psalm 24:1).  “The Lord gave and the Lord took away, may the name of the Lord be praised” (Job).

It is the very nature of God to give. He gave Adam and Eve his image in the garden.  He gave them the rule, control, and care for all of creation.  It was all given to them.  Even after they sinned against them, it was God’s nature to give them a promise of rescue from the demands for justice - the taking of their life.  He took life from Another in the place of their own life; he pictured that in the taking of life from a passover lamb, an innocent, blemish free lamb.  He did it in the person of his Son, whose life he demanded (Isaiah 53:10 - “though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin.”).  This is what God demanded.  This is what God took.

But that’s why he gave!  He GAVE his Son (John 3:16) so that he might GIVE eternal life to all who might believe.  God is a giver of the most extreme kind, crazy, extreme, overflowing gifts.  Even his own Son.  And then more on top of more.  “Out of his fullness we have all received grace in place of grace already given” (John 1:16).