Deuteronomy 26:10 And now, behold, I have brought the firstfruits of the land
I can remember almost all the toys I gave away as a child. In all fairness, there were not a lot of them, but I remember them. I had perhaps thousands of toys growing up. The ones I remember are the ones I gave away. I distinctly remember some friends who had a house fire and lost pretty much everything. My mom directed that we give some of our toys to their children. I remember picking out toys to give to the little boy in the other family. I remember exactly what those toys were. Why? It is because they were mine and I was giving them away. I will never forget those.
What are you giving today? What are you giving to God? What about your family, church, and others around you? Are you giving your first and best? Deuteronomy 26 begins as many chapters of Deuteronomy do by saying, “And it shall be, when thou art come in unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.” It is a certainty, when. It is going to happen. Giveth is the nature of the land they had. They didn’t take it. Canaan didn’t give it. God made it, owns it, and gave it. Verse 2 says, “That thou shalt take of the first of all the fruit of the earth.” They were to take it from the land God gave and present it to God. Verse 10 says, “Behold, I have brought the firstfruits of the land, which thou, O LORD, hast given me.”
What you see here is that gratitude acknowledges God’s ownership. If you are a grateful person, it is because you don’t own it. God gave it and He is the source of the things you have. You find that in verses 1-3, 9-11, and 15. Every one of those verses mentions the nature of the land of Canaan as the land which God had given. God promised it and gave it. God had been so good. So, fundamentally giving is an act of gratitude. We want to give because we want to be virtuous and noble. I hope you are generous, but giving is an act of gratitude. That is the nature of giving. It is not primarily an act of generosity. Now, generosity exists and I want to be generous when I give, but when I give it is not so much a matter of my virtue as it is my honesty.
Verse 5 says, “And thou shalt speak and say before the LORD thy God, a Syrian ready to perish was my father, and he went down into Egypt, and sojourned there with few, and became there a nation, great and mighty, and populous.” He is giving the story. You came from Padam Aram and ended up in Egypt. When you were there, you were oppressed. You cried and the Lord heard your voice, and He has given you this land. Now you are giving the firstfruits of that which God has given and are to rejoice in what God has given.
So, generosity is really honesty, a matter of saying, “I’m honest enough to know that what I have is a gift from God.” The only thing you can give God that God did not give you first is gratitude. You may say, “I don’t just have gifts. I worked on these gifts. I worked hard for my living.” That all may be true, but the very air you have to breath, the gifts you have that you have honed, are gifts that God gave. So, giving is an act of gratitude. If I am not grateful, I may give a lot, but it is not really giving in the Bible sense. This is not a proof text. You find this sentiment throughout the Bible.
Giving is not primarily an act of piety. We ought to love others. Verses 12 and following go from the firstfruits that are to be given to a tithe which was for “the Levites, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow.” God has a heart of compassion for those who are in need. Israel was to have that same heart because they had been slaves and in need. They had been in the land of captivity. God brought them out and prospered them. So, the focus here is not your generosity to others or even your love for God. That is the key, but how do you even know you love God? What is obvious and illustrated over and again is God’s love for you. You ought to love God, but when you focus on God’s love for you, it both generates a love for God and a love to others from God through you. So, giving is not simply piety; it is a matter of gratitude.
It is not a matter of duty. Both the firstfruits and the tithe were essentially rituals Israel was to perform. There were prescribed ways of saying things they were supposed to say, “You shall say when you come before the feast…” What often happens with holy days or holidays is that they become nothing more than a vacation and an excuse to celebrate instead of actually remembering what it is we are celebrating. Giving is not merely a duty. We should give, that is incumbent upon us, but when you claim God, God claims everything else. Verse 17 says, “Thou has avouched the LORD this day to be thy God.” The one thing they had was God and God had everything else. He had brought them out of Egypt and into Canaan. Verse 18 says, “And the LORD hath avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people, as he hath promised thee.”
The question today is, “How grateful are you?” An indication of how grateful you are is how giving you are. Not just if you give, but how you give. How you give is an indication of how grateful you are. Are you a giver? Are you generous? The real question is are you grateful? Giving is an act of gratitude.