Sunday, September 27, 2026
This week the nation's own bond market began charging for a war, a swelling deficit, and a borrowed technology boom all at once, and the bill is being handed to the families and builders who live on credit.
A Christian should read this week's news as scripture reads it: a government that finances war and ambition on borrowed money hands its lenders the right to bite, and faithful people respond by shrinking what they owe and refusing to bind their households to that bite. The prophet saw this long before any bond auction: "Woe to him who heaps up what was never his — how long? — and loads himself down with pledges! Will not those who bite you rise without warning, and those who shake you wake, and you become their plunder?" (Habakkuk 2:6–7). The Hebrew word for his creditors is nosh-KHEH-kha (noshkhekha, נֹשְׁכֶיךָ), "your biters," from the verb nah-SHAKH, "to bite," the same root that gives the Law its word for interest, NEH-shek (neshek) — literally "a bite." Habakkuk is describing exactly what the long end of the market did this week: the lenders woke and took a larger bite, and the bite lands first on the household refinancing a home and the driver paying more at the pump. The apostle's instruction answers it directly: "Leave no debt standing to anyone, except the debt of loving one another" (Romans 13:8). The verb is o-FEI-leh-teh (opheilete), a present-tense command that forbids carrying an obligation forward, not merely taking one on — for a family facing rising rates, paying down what is owed is an act of obedience, and it removes one more mouth from the lender's table.
The same pattern runs through the great technology buildout, and Jesus named it precisely: "Which of you, intending to raise a tower, does not first sit down and tally the expense, whether he holds enough to complete it? Otherwise, once he has laid the base and has no strength to finish, everyone watching will start to mock him, saying, 'This man began to build and could not see it through'" (Luke 14:28–30). The word for "tally" is psay-FEE-zei (psēphizei, ψηφίζει), from PSAY-fos, a small pebble — the counting stones a builder moved one by one across a board before he broke ground. This week a vast data-center project was halted by its own developer's notice, its financing grows costlier as yields climb, and a local government near the seat of power voted to stop new ones altogether. The tower in the parable is not condemned for its height; the builder is shamed for starting on money he did not have. A Christian who works in, invests in, or lives beside this buildout is right to ask whether the pebbles were ever counted, and to keep their own savings out of projects whose completion depends on borrowing staying cheap.
Beneath the rate shock sits the war that drives it, and scripture traces war to its actual source: "Where do the wars and quarrels among you come from? Do they not come from your cravings for pleasure, marching on campaign inside your own members? You desire and do not have; you kill and covet and cannot lay hold of it" (James 4:1–2). The Greek calls those cravings hay-doh-NOHN (hēdonōn) and says they are stra-tyoo-oh-MEH-nohn (strateuomenōn) — soldiering, already deployed — so that the outward war is only the second front of a campaign that began in the appetite. A government that rejects an offer to reopen a shipping lane while scheduling renewed bombing for after an election is revealing which appetite commands its campaign. The same week, armed vessels destroyed a fishing boat on suspicion and left its crew adrift, with no published legal rationale. Among the things the Lord hates the proverb lists "hands that pour out innocent blood" (Proverbs 6:17), and the Hebrew is dahm nah-KEE (dam naqi) — blood that is clean, clear, exempt from any charge. Suspicion is not a charge. The faithful response is to say so plainly, to refuse to baptize any campaign that treats men's lives as cheaper than the appetite driving it, and to pray and vote as people who know where wars begin.