Welcome to Apostolic Life in the 21st Century, a podcast dedicated to helping modern-day believers live out the teachings of the First Century Church.

This podcast is part of the teaching ministry of Dr. David K. Bernard.

Dr. Bernard is dedicated his life to studying the Bible and helping believers apply its message to their daily lives.

In apostolic life in the 21st century, Dr. Bernard answers your questions about what the Bible

teaches and how those teachings apply to everyday life. Thank you for joining us for this episode.

Exodus 22 and 25 says, if you lend money to any of my people who are poor

among you, you shall not be like a money lender to him. You shall not charge him interest. And there

are several other Bible passages that reiterate the same theme. God prohibited his people from charging

interest on their money, at least when they loaned it

to a fellow Israelite. So here's the problem for those of us who live in the 21st century, at least in the

West. Our entire financial system, as you well know, is based on loaning money and collecting

interest. And if the United States, if we tried to literally follow this policy from the Old Testament, our

economy would collapse. So the question for us today, I guess, is are we sinning by putting our money

in the bank or in financial markets with the intention of collecting a return on our investment?

Or is it a sin for financial institutions to charge interest? How should a Christian look at this in light of our current

circumstances? The short answer is no. And let's go back to the Old Testament. Yes, there are a number

of passages that say the King James Version uses the term usury, which can mean simply interest or it can also mean excessive

interest, which is usually how it's used in American law. But either way, I think the most

important thing is to understand that those Old Testament teachings were given to ancient

Israel that had a subsistence or agrarian economy.

And what I mean by that is almost everyone survived by farming or crafts.

And there had to be a few people that were merchants or shopkeepers.

...