Dishonest scales are an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is His delight. (Prov.11:1)
Diverse weights and diverse measures, they are both alike, an abomination to the LORD. (Prov.20:10)
This past Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced that the Federal Reserve would begin a new program of buying treasury debt. There are two things remarkable about this program: its size and its method.
According to Bernanke, the program calls for the purchase of up to $1.2 Trillion of government debt instruments. This is unprecedented.
What is more, these purchases will be made directly from the Treasury Department, not on the secondary market, as has been the practice in the past. This will enable the Fed to directly underwrite the massive defict spending of the Obama administration.
Some, praising Bernanke’s decision, have described this program as a bold move. Others have expressed concerns that it is inflationary. But a man with a Christian understanding of economics would describe it using this word: theft. Let me explain.
In the Bible money is a weight of some commodity. For example, when Sarah died, Abraham bought a field from Ephron the Hittite so he could bury her. According to Genesis 24:16, Abraham, “weighed out the silver for Ephron which he had named in the hearing of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, currency of the merchants.” Since Abraham paid for the field with a weight of silver, he had to have scales to weigh it with. And God required those scales to be honest.
For in a monetary system that depended on commodity weight, an unscrupulous merchant could cheat his customer by using heavy weights as counterbalances to buy and light ones to sell. God explicity condemned this practice several times in the Old Testament. In Duteronomy25:13-16 we read, “You shall not have in your bag differing weights, a heavy and a light. You shall not have in your house differing measures, a large and a small. You shall have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure, that your days may be lengthened in the land which the LORD your God is giving you. For all who do such things, all who behave unrighteously, are an abomination to the LORD your God.” Here we see God condemning false units of account and approving true ones. For more on this see Lev.19:36; Prov.16:11, 20:10,23 and Mic.6:11.
The US Dollar, like the Shekel of Abraham’s time, was originally defined as a weight of silver, but this is no longer the case. Today the Dollar is a fiat currency, meaning it’s money because the government says it’s money. As a result, tracking the value of the dollar is more difficult than simply looking at how much silver it can be exchanged for, yet it is still possible to track the value of the dollar over time. When economists do this, they find that since 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was established, the dollar has lost something like 96% of its value, or approximately 1% per year. The result of the dollar’s devaluation is what we call inflation. Or to put it in biblical terms, the Fed has, since its inception, persisted in using lighter weights every year, defrauding the American people. Thus, Bernanke’s “bold move,” when considered in the light of Scriptures, far from being praiseworthry, is, in fact, a breaking of the eight commandment prohibiting theft and an abomination to God.
Lux Lucet 
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Hi Steve,
I don’t understand why the Fed (banks) do things like this. Who does it advantage? I can understand the dishonest merchant gaining from a wrong weight, but since the Government is made up of citizens, how does this kind of manoeuvre help anyone? Somebody must be getting gain from this, but who?
The big banks. They are the first to receive the newly “printed” money from the Fed. They can then turn around and spend it at it’s full value before the newly created currency causes existing currency to go down in value. It’s just like a counterfeiter. A counterfeiter prints the money and spends it at full value. The cost is born by someone down the line after the fraud is discovered.
Money creation by the Federal Reserve and other central banks is, morally speaking, indistinguishable from counterfeiting. That is to say, what the Fed does is the moral equivalent of theft. But it’s legalized theft. One implication of what the Scriptures say about honest weights and measures is that God hates the monetary policy of the Fed. Another implication is that he will judge those who carry out the fraud.