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Coping with Life 39 – Stealing
Coping with Life 39 – Stealing
Mike Willis
The sin of stealing is related to the crimes of larceny, robbery, and burglary. Larceny involves any wrongful taking and carrying away of property, the absence of consent for the taking, and the intent to deprive another of his legal property. The eighth of the Ten Commandments is simple, “You shall not steal” (Exod. 20:15). The Jewish legislation is reproduced in the New Testament Scriptures: Paul wrote, “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need” (Eph. 4:28).
As I near my 77th birthday, I remember as a child that my family would leave for church on Lord’s day without locking any of the doors in our house, we only closed the screen door to keep out the flies. Men would usually have a gun rack in their pickups and it was not uncommon to see two weapons on the rack. When they went into the small town in Texas near which we lived, they left their windows rolled down in their pickups so that the automobile would not be so hot when they returned from whatever business they conducted in town. It was expected that the guns would still be on their rack when the men returned. Does this sound a lot like the Andy Griffith show about Mayberry? That was how life in the United States was in the 1950-1960s.
The casting aside of divinely revealed moral standards within our country has resulted in an explosion of crime. We see the effects of rejecting a divinely revealed moral code in the breaking asunder of the family unit, the slaughter of the unborn, and the criminal activity in our cities. Indiana crime statistics are not easy to find on the internet; the latest year that I could find was 2019. Here is what I found about the number of reported incidents of stealing in Indiana during 2019 (https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/incrime.htm):
Robbery 5,331
Burglary 21,795
Larceny-Theft 97,176
Vehicle theft 13,723
Have you been a victim of stealing? I have!
There is a widespread acknowledgment in our society that stealing is both morally wrong and a criminal act. So why is there a proliferation of stealing? It is not because we do not know better or that it is not a crime. First of all, we should ask how effective is state government doing at punishing criminal behavior? Is it stiff enough that men come out of their punishment with a resolution not to be guilty of stealing again or do they come out of our prisons having learned from other criminals how to steal in such a way as to not get caught? Therefore we ask, “Is our justice system reducing the number of thefts?” Secondly, how effective are parents doing at teaching their children not to steal? We might be earning failing grades in both departments.
A society that has been created by the moral teaching that “there are no moral absolutes” is powerless to prohibit stealing of any kind. The best argument that a moral relativist can be given is a pragmatic one (that is, “it doesn’t work well”). The self-centered approach to life is, “If I want it and can take it without harsh repercussions, I will!” Until Americans go back to a moral code grounded in God’s creation of mankind in His own image and His legislation of a moral code governing all of mankind, we are not likely to see any improvement in stealing in our communities.
