Robbing God or Misreading Him?

The Curse We Inherited.

The tithe appears in Scripture before the Law, and when it does, it appears as a willing act of worship to God for what He has done. That matters.

But typically, the first time a person hears about tithing, it is not from Abraham giving a tenth of the war spoils to Melchizedek.

It is usually not from Jacob's vow to give a tenth if the Lord brought him safely home.

The first time someone hears about it is usually not even from the instructions given to Moses for the three distinct tithes that Israel practiced.

Most often, the first time the tithe finds us is when the question in Malachi 3 thunders from the pulpit:

"Will a man rob God?"

Then comes this verdict:

"Yet ye have robbed me...in tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse..."^[1]

And just like that, those whom Christ redeemed from the curse of the Law are handed the curse of Malachi like an overdue bill from Sinai.

Yet no one pauses to ask what just happened.

No one asks what that says about the power of the Gospel. No one asks what that says about the blood of Christ.

And before asking whether Christians should tithe, we need to ask a heavier question:

Can you be in Christ and still be under the curse of the Law for not tithing?

Paul says there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.^[2] Did he forget to mention the fine print of Malachi 3 across the bottom of the gospel?

Paul says Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law by becoming a curse for us.^[3] Is that true only until you're delinquent on a tithe payment?

Paul says the record of debt that stood against us was nailed to the cross.^[4] But in some churches, it can almost sound like that debt was stapled to the church budget.

This Is Not a Money Problem

This essay does not ask whether Christians should give, or whether giving a tithe is good. It does not ask whether stinginess is sin.

It does not ask whether God corrects His children.

The question is narrower.
And heavier.

Can the redeemed in Christ be placed back under a covenant curse that Christ bore?

That is a heavy thing to put on a Christian conscience.

If Scripture teaches it, then we must say it. We do not get to edit the Bible for emotional comfort.

But before we defend it, repeat it, preach it, or pass it to the next generation, we owe the text a plain question:

Is that what Malachi actually tells the church?

I was sincere when I preached Malachi 3, and I believed every word of it. I was not building empires or manipulating congregations for personal gain. I genuinely tried to hold myself and God's people to what I understood to be a biblical standard. I believed that standard would produce faithfulness, and that faithfulness would produce blessing.

I was not unique in that. Preachers just like me have paid the same tithe they required of others. They carried real spiritual conviction about it, not greed. They were trying to honor God and protect the faithfulness of their people.

That deserves to be acknowledged.

What it does not settle, though, is the question of accuracy. Sincerity and precision are not the same thing. And the question before us is not one about giving or about motives.

It is about whether the curse in Malachi 3 was ever meant to be leveled at the church of Jesus Christ, and whether we have ever seriously asked who it was written to in the first place.

In many churches, Malachi's rebuke to Israel becomes a standing threat over every Christian in every generation:

Bring the tithe into the church, or you are robbing God.

Rob God, and you are under a curse.

When money gets tight, that teaching does strange things to the soul.

Suddenly, a lost job becomes a spiritual accusation. A medical bill becomes a test of faithfulness. A struggling family begins to wonder whether God is withholding blessing because they paid rent first.

That is not a small thing.

I lived under that weight for years.
I taught that message.

I obeyed it.
I defended it.

I thought questioning it meant questioning God.
And I never questioned what it said about Christ and His Gospel.

That is exactly how a received teaching survives unchallenged: not because the Bible is unclear, but because we stop asking questions about verses we believe we already understand. The truth can withstand our scrutiny.

So I finally asked the question I should have asked much earlier:

Who was Malachi actually written to?

Not Christians.
Not Christ's church.

Not every believer in every age.

Not believers united to Christ under the new covenant.

Malachi 3 was written for us, but it was not addressed to us. It is given for our instruction, but before we treat its curse as enforcing a command for the church, we have to ask whether the covenant situation is the same.

It was written to a specific people, in a specific moment: the returned exiles of Judah, roughly four centuries before Christ, under a priesthood that had grown corrupt and a people who had grown careless.

The Levites were being deprived of their portion.
The temple was being neglected.
The covenant was being treated as optional.

That gap is worth sitting with.
It is not a small gap.

Because if Malachi was addressing a specific covenant failure in post-exilic Judah, under terms God had already defined in the Law of Moses, then the question becomes unavoidable:

Are we reading our own name into someone else's letter?

This is not a creative reading or a convenient loophole. It is the basic work of asking to whom a passage was written before deciding what it demands of us.

The Answer the Text Gives

The teachers who preached Malachi as a standing curse over their congregations were not inventing from nothing. They were reading Scripture. But they were not reading it carefully enough to ask whether its address had changed when the covenant did.

It had.

And once that is seen clearly, something else follows: if Malachi's covenant curse does not transfer to the church, then neither should the anxiety it produced. And neither should the obedience it compelled.

That changes the question.
But it does not answer it.

If the curse in Malachi 3 belongs to a covenant the church is no longer under, then we are no longer asking whether Christians are under that curse. We are asking what God has actually commanded the church about giving—and whether the tithe, as God defined it, is part of that command at all.

To answer that honestly, we have to go back before Malachi. Back to God's description itself, and to what the tithe actually was before tradition told us what it means.

UP NEXT:
That definition is not what most people expect. Let's take a look at The Tithe God Commanded.

FOOTNOTES: