We do not have a temple for the Law. It was destroyed around 70 AD by Titus. The one remnant of the temple is a wall, and praying there is as close as a Jew gets to the temple. So why are we considering this passage today?
The answer is that we enter contracts foolishly.
Another person has been arrested at the border because of student loan debt. The woman was arrested at Auckland Airport as she tried to board a flight to Australia on Tuesday, the Herald understands.
She appeared in Manukau District Court on Wednesday. An Inland Revenue spokesman confirmed an arrest warrant was executed by police this week. Taxpayer secrecy prevented the release of more details.
“Our powers to arrest at the border are used as a very last resort, and would only follow strenuous efforts to contact the borrower to make repayment arrangements – these would typically involve making phone calls, sending correspondence via mail and email to the borrower, and attempting to contact them via any third parties such as nominated persons and/or any known employer.”
About 20 people who have defaulted on their student loans are being monitored for possible arrest if they return to New Zealand.
The idea of student loans is that the qualifications one gains are a private good, and thus you should pay for them. I grew up in an earlier time, where your qualifications were paid for by the state, and you paid back by working for the state, probably at a lower wage, and probably where you did not want to be. There was a matching service for House Surgeons, and you were told where you are going. The Matching service still exists.
Now, this means that well off families — the loans are interest-free — can simply bank the money and pay it off rapidly once earning, having a good deposit for a house courtesy of the NZ Inland Service, if needed. For they live at home, and do not spend the loan. In other countries, this is leading to women becoming concubines so they avoid loans.
For the sake of a qualification, we are re-engineering white slavery.
We enter contracts. And at time it is to our peril.
Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. To draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know that they are doing evil. Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are on earth. Therefore let your words be few. For a dream comes with much business, and a fool’s voice with many words.
When you vow a vow to God, do not delay paying it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you vow. It is better that you should not vow than that you should vow and not pay. Let not your mouth lead you into sin, and do not say before the messenger that it was a mistake. Why should God be angry at your voice and destroy the work of your hands? For when dreams increase and words grow many, there is vanity; but God is the one you must fear.
(Ecclesiastes 5:1-7 ESV)
Let us return to the text for a second. When it comes to giving to the church, be planned, be deliberate, and give what you can afford. Use your banking system of automatic payments, if you can. You want to pass the collection plate: better churches do not have them.
Then you don’t have people dunning you.
But we have to as if what we are doing is right. Women need support. In a more traditional time, you were supported by your father, who inspected the books of your fiancée before allowing him to propose to you. Because you were going to get pregnant, in all probability, within eighteen months of your wedding night. And the state stayed out of supporting mothers.
In this time of freedom many women cannot compete except by looks. If you are poor, and you have not been taught about chastity, you see sex as a commodity and you want the best provider you can get. Dating a sugar daddy trades age for provision, and most men who can afford such are successful and can provide. You are being a concubine.
There is but one problem. Being a concubine ruins you when it comes to being a wife. If our church had discipline, both of you will be barred from communion until you had repented and confessed: the old church did this to Kings.
But not now. The contracts we have put the souls of our young people in peril. Time to make student debt something akin to a credit card. Higher interest, because of the risk. But something you can walk away from.
Better still, make entrance to university competitive and subsidized, and bring back apprenticeships where you get paid: the apprentice should be making about twice as much as the student.
Or you will find, again, that a university degree signifies but that your family was wealthy enough to educate you to the point you are functionally useless. .
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