Robbing God or Misreading Him?

Has anyone ever pointed out that Jesus and His apostles wouldn't have been tithers?

Under the Law, they didn't qualify as those who paid tithes—or as Levites authorized to receive them. Directing "tithes" to Jesus or the apostles would have violated the very system God Himself prescribed.

If those statements feel shocking, outrageous, or dubious, that's understandable. Most of us have never walked carefully through what God Himself spelled out about the nature and handling of the tithe. If the tithe God described in Scripture were the same one churches teach today, most Christians would never owe it, most pastors could never receive it, and Jesus Himself still would have died a non-tither.

You shouldn't accept these claims just because I assert them. You should test them with an open Bible. Truth can withstand scrutiny.

Let me be clear from the start:

• I am not arguing against generosity, sacrificial giving, or financially supporting the work of the gospel. The New Testament is full of calls to give freely, joyfully, and even painfully for the sake of others. Generous, freewill giving to the local church and the ministry of the gospel is something I participate in and encourage. That is not the topic or the scope of this essay.
• What I am challenging is something much narrower and far more dangerous: the teaching that New Testament believers are commanded to tithe ten percent of their monetary income to the local church, and that failure to do so puts them "under a curse" for "robbing God."

Many of us learned this with Malachi 3 ringing in our ears and a knot in our stomachs:

"Will a man rob God?
Yet ye have robbed me.

But ye say, "Wherein have we robbed thee?" In tithes and offerings.
Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation.

"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."
— Malachi 3:8-9

The implication was simple: if you don't pay ten percent of your paycheck to the church, God will slam the windows of heaven shut. Your financial struggles? Your job loss? Your debt? Somewhere, someone will hint, "Make sure you're not robbing God."

I believed this. I obeyed it. I even defended it. I was so anchored in my conviction about paying tithes that even when someone took the time to show me God's own definition of the tithe, it still took over two years to wrestle my belief into submission to His actual words.

As I struggled to loosen my grip on such a deep-seated church doctrine, I realized my pet doctrine was barking loudly and shedding verses all over the place—hoping I wouldn't notice the mess.