At this point Wiese tells two stories about how God supernaturally provided for him. One was when he needed a large sum of money and was approached by someone in church who handed him $2000 because he had helped her save money when she bought her home. Now again, could God have orchestrated that? Sure but the assumption made and being sold here was it must have been God and that brings us to another popular scheme used by pro-tithers. That everything positive must be because of tithing and everything negative is brushed off as an attack of the enemy. In my old church I remember a huckster preached one Friday evening and when he took his offering he claimed God told him ten people were going to sow $300 into his ministry. Translation? He wanted three thousand dollars for his work there that evening. He said God promised that everyone who did would receive some kind of breakthrough miracle within three months. What a scam. Now anything remotely positive in their lives over the next three months would be attributed to this "seed." It doesn't work like that beloved. God is not a whore. He is not withholding blessings from you until you pay Him.
"Malachi 3:10 says to prove Him and see if I will not throw open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing there is not room enough to receive." -- Bill Wiese
No false tithing argument is complete without a reference to poor Malachi. Perhaps no scripture is more distorted and mangled than Malachi 3:10. Now, it does indeed say what Bill Wiese said. The point is in understanding the context. Who is God speaking to through Malachi? For that answer we have to go back two chapters where we find the key verses for today. Verse one reveals that this entire letter is written to the priests! It was not written to the congregation at all! They were the ones robbing God! In verses 7 and 8 we see that God accuses them directly of corrupting the covenant of Levi. This is where the tithe comes into play because the tithe was part of that covenant. If you want to see the corruption in action, we must travel to the book of Nehemiah, who was also active at the time of Malachi. Nehemiah had gone back to King Artaxerxes and while he was gone, the priest Eliashib was committing many offenses within the temple. Nehemiah would come back and clean house:
And after some time I asked leave of the king and came to Jerusalem, and I then discovered the evil that Eliashib had done for Tobiah, preparing for him a chamber in the courts of the house of God. And I was very angry, and I threw all the household furniture of Tobiah out of the chamber. Then I gave orders, and they cleansed the chambers, and I brought back there the vessels of the house of God, with the grain offering and the frankincense. I also found out that the portions of the Levites had not been given to them, so that the Levites and the singers, who did the work, had fled each to his field. -- Nehemiah 13: 6-10 (ESV)
It is the actions of Eliashib that Malachi is referencing in Malachi 3:10. It has nothing to do with the people and is not prescriptive for tithing thousands of years later. Bill Wiese and other tithing pimps would have you believe God is holding closed some magic window of blessings that He will only open up over your life if you pay Him. What utter blasphemous nonsense. We give cheerfully because of all Christ has done not because of greedy dreams of blessing avarice.
"It goes on to say that He will rebuke the devourer for your sake. The devourer is the thief, the devil. He wants to steal your finances. The devourer is also after your health and tithing is a protection against these things." -- Bill Wiese
Just when you think it cannot get anymore repulsive, Bill Wiese just starts beating the sheep unmercifully. It is bad enough that he has tied financial misfortune to God acting like a shylock from the mafia but now the inference is that if you do not pay Him, He will strike you with some form of illness. How repugnant. Beloved sickness entered creation because of the fall of man. God does not spend His day checking the books and seeing who He needs to lay waste to because they have not paid Him. Bill Wiese presents an angry, unmerciful, wicked god to follow. Do not follow him.
"Tithing was also before the law. Cain and Abel tithed. Abraham tithed to Melchizedek." -- Bill Wiese
The complex realized a few years ago that people were starting to easily rebuff the argument of tithing simply by making the law argument I made earlier. They had to come up with new schemes to enforce tithing. That was when you started hearing the tortured twisting of scriptures prior to the law to pretend that tithing has been around forever and is not only part of the law but a universal principle. I have seen teachings so stupid they claim that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the first tithe, please. Cain and Abel did indeed make an offering to the Lord but to claim that as a tithe is ludicrous. There is zero reference to the amount of the offering or the word tithe. Now, the word tithe does appear in the story of Abraham and Melchizedek. Abraham was victorious in war and tithed from the spoils to this king. There is no indication Abraham ever tithed before or after. He actually ended up giving him all of the spoils because he didn't want people to think he prospered because of anyone but God. So as a picture of tithing, we would only tithe once in our lifetime, never from our personal wealth -- only from the spoils of war, and give 100% not 10. You see how quickly such sham arguments fall apart when simple logic and the actual text is applied. The video concludes:
