Yesterday we saw that providing opportunities for work is one of the best ways to help those who are in need. Today, we see that prosperity for everyone depends on mutual trust. After all, it’s impossible for anyone to get ahead if the deck is stacked against him. So it is critical for everyone that the economic rules not be changed in the middle of the game – whether that means a reliable system of weights and measures (verses 13-15), or the expectation that wages earned will be fully and fairly paid (verse 4).

But all of the specifics of today’s passage don’t fit today’s society. For in the days of Moses, land was the main source of wealth. And in that culture, land was always passed down from father to son, so it would remain in the same family and in the same tribe. A man who died without a son thus not only had no one to care for his widow or for any of his unmarried daughters. His land would be lost to his extended family for all generations to come.

Today, women are more able to work and support themselves, and prosperity is no longer so closely tied to the inheritance of real estate. So what can we learn from the ancient requirement that a brother raise up children for his deceased relative? At the very least, we can say this: if prosperity requires our ability to trust in a stable financial and governmental system, it requires even more trust in our families. Family members must be able to rely on each other, especially in tough times, in spite of any inconvenience or financial hardship that such help might require.

And we find the same principle explicitly stated in the New Testament, with Paul telling Timothy, “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever (I Timothy 5:8).

So instead of assuming that someone else or some government agency or charitable organization will care for those who are closest to us, what can we do to help them today? And how can we work to strengthen the families and institutions on which we all rely?

Deuteronomy 25:4-16 (NASB)

4 “You shall not muzzle the ox while he is threshing.
5 “When brothers live together and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the deceased shall not be married outside the family to a strange man. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her and take her to himself as wife and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her.
6 “And it shall be that the first-born whom she bears shall assume the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out from Israel.
7 “But if the man does not desire to take his brother’s wife, then his brother’s wife shall go up to the gate to the elders and say, ‘My husband’s brother refuses to establish a name for his brother in Israel; he is not willing to perform the duty of a husband’s brother to me.’
8 “Then the elders of his city shall summon him and speak to him. And if he persists and says, ‘I do not desire to take her,’
9 then his brother’s wife shall come to him in the sight of the elders, and pull his sandal off his foot and spit in his face; and she shall declare, ‘Thus it is done to the man who does not build up his brother’s house.’
10 “And in Israel his name shall be called, ‘The house of him whose sandal is removed.’
11 “If two men, a man and his countryman, are struggling together, and the wife of one comes near to deliver her husband from the hand of the one who is striking him, and puts out her hand and seizes his genitals,
12 then you shall cut off her hand; you shall not show pity.
13 “You shall not have in your bag differing weights, a large and a small.
14 “You shall not have in your house differing measures, a large and a small.
15 “You shall have a full and just weight; you shall have a full and just measure, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the LORD your God gives you.
16 “For everyone who does these things, everyone who acts unjustly is an abomination to the LORD your God.