The Little White Lie Called “Tithing”
Let me be very clear from the start: the teaching that tithing ten percent of your income to your local church is a commandment of God is simply not true. This is not my opinion — it is what the Bible does and does not say. So the question is, why would church leaders, who know and quote the Ten Commandments regularly, break one law consistently. That is actually an easy question.
Bottom line, it is next to impossible to build and operate a modern day religious organization without lots and lots of money. And church leaders either know, or believe, that using the biblical model for giving would never pull in enough funds to support what they want to build. If no compulsion, no pressure, no guilt, was used, the budget could not, in their opinion, be met. So you need pressure, compelling pressure, pressure with a curse and a blessing attached to it. Enter Malachi 3:10. Give us 10% or more and you’ll be blessed by God. Withhold it and be cursed. We’ll cover the verse in a second, but suffice it to say, when applied to the wrong group, in the wrong time, in the wrong country, collected by the wrong people, used for the wrong purpose, requested in the wrong form, it can be rather compelling. Especially to a trusting, good and decent christian.
The Old Testament tithe was never money. It was always crops and livestock — a tax on the land God had given to Israel. It was owed only by Israelites who farmed the ground or raised animals, and it went to support the Levites — the tribe set apart to run the temple and the affairs of the nation — along with the poor.
The New Testament, by contrast, never tells Christians to give anyone a tithe. Not once. It teaches the opposite: give cheerfully, from the heart, and not under compulsion. The Old Testament tithe was the very definition of compulsory.
Malachi 3:10 — the most abused verse in the debate
Almost every modern tithing sermon leans on a single verse:
“Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,” says the Lord Almighty, “and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it.” — Malachi 3:10
Read in context, it is one of the most misapplied passages in all of Scripture. Malachi was written to the nation of Israel under the Old Covenant, and God rebukes the people — and their priests — for neglecting the tithes and offerings the Law required (Malachi 3:8–9). So the tithe really was being withheld. But the argument for applying this to you does not fail on that point. It fails on what kind of tithe it was, and who it was for.
Look at what the verse describes. The tithe was to be brought into the storehouse — and the storehouse was exactly that: a real building where food was kept. Not a church. Not an offering plate. “That there may be food in my house” meant precisely that — food.
And food is the whole point. The Levites were given no territory of their own to farm, so the other tribes brought a tenth of what their land produced, stored it away, and the Levites lived off of it — along with the widow, the orphan, and the poor. That is the system Malachi is defending: an agricultural tithe, paid from the produce of the land, under the Law of Israel, to support a tribe that had no land and a people who had no provision. Whatever else the passage is about, it has nothing to do with a modern Christian’s paycheck.
Modern preachers who aim these verses at your wallet are misusing them — whether they have studied the matter closely enough to know it, or have simply never stopped to question the practice they inherited. Either way, the text does not support it.
What the tithe actually was
Pull back from that one verse and look at the whole system, and the real nature of the tithe comes into focus: it was, more than anything else, a tax — the ancient equivalent of our income tax. The only real difference is that it was assessed on crops and livestock rather than on dollars. It was the funding mechanism of an entire nation.
And like any tax, it paid for a government. It sustained the Tribe of Levi, who owned no land of their own. In exchange, they ran the affairs of both the temple and the state — serving as the priests, the judges, the teachers of the law, and the keepers of records and order. Tithing was how Israel funded its religious and civil administration all at once. A national tax, not a church offering.
Because it came only from the produce of the land, the tithe never touched most people. If you were a shop owner, you did not tithe. If you were a tentmaker, you did not tithe. If you were a carpenter, you did not tithe. Only the increase of the land was ever tithed — crops, cattle, sheep.
Nor was it a tidy ten percent. There were three separate tithes:
- Ten percent went to the Levites, who lived off it.
- Ten percent the worshiper kept and spent himself, to fund travel to Jerusalem for the annual feasts.
- Ten percent every third year went to the poor.
Averaged out, the real tithe came to roughly 23⅓ percent a year — not the neat ten percent preached today. It was a tithe of produce — crops and livestock — not a tax on a person’s money or income. Even Joseph and Mary, who worked in carpentry rather than farming, would not have owed a tithe at all.
The whole system existed to fund the temple and feed the Levites who carried out the sacrifices. There are no more sacrifices. There is no more Levitical priesthood to support. Christ lifted that entire burden off of mankind. So when a man stands in front of you claiming he is qualified to collect your tithe, he is — plainly and simply — not telling you the truth.
This is why the discovery cuts so deep. When Christians who were taught to tithe their entire lives finally see all of this, they realize they were pressured and misled about money — by the very people they trusted most. Once they see it, most are done for good.
Tithing is not the same as giving
None of this means Christians are excused from generosity. It means we have to stop confusing two very different things — a distinction the modern church routinely blurs. Tithing is an Old Testament law: mandatory, binding on those who lived under that law, and fulfilled in Christ. Giving is a New Testament doctrine, and it could not be more different.
New Testament giving is cheerful, free, and uncompelled, and it was almost always directed toward the poor. The rare exception was support for the apostles on their missionary journeys — and even there, Paul often paid his own way by working as a tentmaker, and he made sure the collections he gathered went to those in genuine need, such as the starving believers in Jerusalem. Giving can be far less than ten percent or far more, because the point was never the percentage. It was the heart. Those still trying to earn their standing keep the law; those who have received grace give freely, out of thankfulness for what they were freely given.
The basic facts about tithing
To pull it all together, here are the essentials:
- Tithes were a portion of crops and livestock — not a cash collection.
- They were assessed on the increase of the land, not on a person’s money or income.
- Tithes were received by the Levites, who in turn gave a tenth of what they received to the priests.
- Not everyone owed a tithe. A farmer did; a carpenter did not.
- A Levite had to be from the tribe of Levi and received no land inheritance of his own.
- Much of the tithe was mandated for other uses, such as caring for the poor.
- Part of the tithe was even set aside for the personal needs of the tither.
- Tithing is absent from the early church. It became enforced church practice centuries later, around the 8th or 9th century, as the medieval church grew and needed funding.
- A core purpose of the Old Testament tithe was simply so the hungry could be fed.
- On the whole, tithing tends to make rich churches richer and poor churches poorer.
So how does the teaching of tithing hurt the modern church?
1. It is built on something untrue
The doctrine of tithing for Christians simply is not found in the New Testament — anyone who reads it carefully can confirm that for themselves. When someone misrepresents the truth to you, you naturally begin to distrust everything else they say — and fairly so. If a man cannot be trusted to tell you the truth about money, can he be trusted to handle yours? The Old Testament commanded the tithe. The New Testament commands us to give as God has prospered us — cheerfully, and never under compulsion.
2. It hands your Spirit-led giving over to an institution
Tithing pulls money out of the hands of the giver and consolidates it in one central place. Under that system, the Holy Spirit is no longer needed to guide you in what to support — the organized church makes that decision for you. Whatever the Spirit might have led you to fund becomes moot, because your resources have already been collected and placed in the hands of church leadership. Money given is often spent on things the giver never intended, and worthwhile Christian work outside the local church is left to survive on the scraps the institution leaves behind.
Try this exercise. Write down the amount you would tithe in a year — say it comes to $10,000. Now build a budget for it. Allocate that money wherever you believe it would do the most to accomplish what the Bible and the Holy Spirit call you to do: feeding the hungry, helping the poor, spreading the gospel. When you are finished, set your budget beside your church’s budget and compare the two. The difference is usually all the proof a person needs.
3. It trades joy for obligation
Tithing drains the joy out of being a Christian and replaces it with a sense of duty. In exchange for writing a check, it quietly lets us off the hook for the things we were actually called to do — spreading the gospel, feeding the poor, sheltering the homeless, mending broken hearts. Handing those responsibilities over to paid professionals has produced a system where a great deal of money goes to buildings, salaries, and programs for every person actually reached, while millions in our own country go hungry and homeless. Something is obviously wrong.
The bottom line
It all comes back to what the tithe was for. It existed so the Levites could do two things: live, and carry out the law — running the temple, the courts, the teaching, and the daily affairs of the nation. That is exactly what a government does, and exactly why it collects taxes: to pay the people who keep the system running. The tithe and an income tax share the same basic structure and the same basic purpose. It was a civil and religious tax for the nation of Israel — never a template for funding a local congregation. Lift it out of that structure and drop it onto the modern church, and you are not applying Scripture. You are misusing it.
“Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” — 2 Corinthians 9:7
So give generously. Give joyfully. Help the poor, support faithful work, and care for the people around you. Just do it as a free child of God under grace — not as a debtor paying a tax that Christ already lifted from your shoulders.
