Bitcoin: The Monetary Plumb Line

Posted on December 11th, 2023

by Mike Hatch

The plumb line is an incredibly simple, yet brilliant, technology that has been indispensable in engineering and construction for thousands of years, dating back to ancient Egypt. It consists of a weight, often in the shape of an upside-down cone, tied to the end of a string.

When the engineer holds the plumb line by the end of the string and allows the weight to hang freely, gravity does the work. Gravity acting upon the weight pulls the string tight and straight. The result is a perfectly perpendicular line to the ground that acts as a standard for proper construction. If this process isn’t followed and the wall is just a little misaligned, the rest of the building will be effected negatively, leading to systemic problems.

The plumb line was designed to leverage the laws of creation which, when cooperated with, are helpful in building structures that are safe and useful. When these laws are violated or neglected it causes harm or even death.

In scripture God uses the plumb line as a metaphor to illustrate his righteous and perfect law. For example, Amos 7:7-8 says, 7 This is what he showed me: The Lord was standing by a wall that had been built true to plumb, with a plumb line in his hand. 8 And the Lord asked me, “What do you see, Amos?”

“A plumb line,” I replied.

Then the Lord said, “Look, I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.”

God used a plumb line to discriminate against his people, Israel, who had been called to live by this standard as His chosen people. Instead, they rebelled against God, neglected His law, and turned to pagan gods and practices.

There are many other places in the Old Testament where God uses the metaphor of a plumb line, or measuring line, including 2 Kings 21:13, Isaiah 28:17, Isaiah 34:11, Jeremiah 31:39, Lamentations 2:8, Zechariah 1:16, Zechariah 2:1, and Zechariah 4:10.

God holds out a plumb line through the word given to the Old Testament prophets in order to demonstrate how crooked Israel had become and how far they had fallen away from His righteous standards. It’s interesting to me that He uses the metaphor of an engineering tool that leverages the natural laws He established to govern creation both to illustrate the crooked nature of Israel and to judge them.

In the Saylor/Breedlove podcast series Michael Saylor said, “Engineering is an incredibly honorable, ethical, life-affirming profession. The engineer takes a look at their circumstances and nature and they use their intellect and every material and technique at hand in order to construct a better world for everyone and everything they love.”

Saylor is more right than he knows, especially from a Christian perspective.

Whether they know it or not, effective engineers must submit themselves to the God-ordained, immutable laws of creation in order to build safe and reliable structures. There are no shortcuts or ways to cheat the system. Lives are at stake! No one wants to drive over a bridge, live in a house, or sit on a deck built by compromised engineering standards.

The unchanging principles of value and value creation are no different, including the mechanism we use (money) to measure that value. There are consequences to corrupt or debased money that violates the God-ordained laws of reaping and sowing. In fact, God reserves special hatred for monetary debasement when he describes it as an “abomination” (Deut. 25:16; Prov. 11:1, 20:10), a word reserved for sins that are especially repugnant to Him.

In Isaiah 3:15 God says that Israel’s monetary corruption was “crushing my people,” and “grinding the faces of the poor.” He even compares debased monetary practices to “violence” in Micah 6:12. This makes so much more sense when we think of it from an engineering perspective.

Bitcoin as a Monetary Plumb Line

Unfortunately, like compromised engineering standards that are concealed, the consequences of monetary debasement can lay dormant for a long time. Until, that is, there is a catastrophic failure due to some unforeseen event that places excessive stresses on the system.

Sadly, we have been living within a corrupt monetary system for so long that most of us do not know any other way. Many levels of abstraction have been layered on top of debased and corrupt money to hide the violation from us. We cannot imagine a different system, until there is a catastrophic failure, or a plumb line is introduced to contrast the evil.

In the Old Testament passages I mentioned previously, God placed a plumb line among his people in order to reveal their sin. This sin included a debased monetary system that reflected their debased hearts. However, the corrupt incentives built into the system often kept Israel from changing. Rather than heed the message, they attacked the messenger (Matthew 23:37).

Much like the message form the Old Testament prophets, Bitcoin functions very much like a monetary plumb line. God seems to be using Bitcoin to shed light on the economic violation of His just standards and the exploitation of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Like so many others, after hundreds of hours of reading and learning, I came to understand that Bitcoin embodied those same immutable laws that God requires for just weights and measures, or “honest money,” as Economist and Theologian, Gary North, described.

In fact, Proverbs 11:1 says, “just weights find favor” with the Lord. Therefore, as an honest monetary ledger, Bitcoin is favored by God.

I used to think gold was the answer. It was clearly the best money. In fact, I went as far as to think that gold was God’s provision for honest money, based on his immutable laws of creation. The elemental nature of gold seemed too perfectly designed to function as money, as if God intended it to be so.

However, as good as gold is at being money, gold is not responsible for its accounting. Sinful, rebellious humans are responsible for the ledger that governs the use of gold, and we will always manipulate it for selfish and corrupt motives. Whether it be mixing gold with base metals or creating more claim checks than what is actually owned, gold will always be susceptible to abuse.

The beauty of Bitcoin is that it takes this responsibility for the ledger out of the hands of people and brings it back under the authority of God’s law by virtue of mathematics.

God’s Judgment

In addition to discriminating against our corrupt monetary system, like other plumb lines in scripture, Bitcoin is a warning of God’s impending judgment. The Amos 7 passage ends with God saying, “I will spare them no longer.” There are similar warnings in the other Old Testament passages that use the plumb line as a metaphor. He’s saying that he will use a plumb line to determine whether the wall that was built should be torn down and rebuilt.

James also eludes to the judgment of the rich elite who have exploited the most vulnerable in Israel. James 5:1 says, “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you.” These are words we could apply to the rich elite today who have exploited the most vulnerable for their wealth and status.

You might be thinking of bankers or politicians when I say “rich elite” and you would be correct. However, when you zoom out, we Americans have enjoyed unparalleled wealth and prestige compared to the rest of the world. Sadly, most of the wealth we enjoy today can be attributed to the looting of other vulnerable nations.

Alex Gladstein has covered this topic at length in his books, Check Your Financial Privilege and Hidden Repression: How the IMF and World Bank Sell Exploitation as Development. Most recently, Jimmy Song also dove into this topic in his book, Fiat Ruins Everything.

My point is that just because we’re not in a privileged status within the United States doesn’t mean we are innocent. There are ways in which we are complicit and, as Christians, we need to take heed of God’s warning through Bitcoin. The church must repent and call sin out for what it is. The challenge is overcoming the incentives built into the system the church has been living by for so long.

We must choose to forego the fiat advantages we have enjoyed in order to step onto the ark and avoid being swept away by God’s judgment. Otherwise we will suffer great loss and lose our witness. As Jesus said,

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” - Matthew 5:13

Conclusion

The longer I study Bitcoin in light of God’s word the more I understand these God-ordained laws that govern reality on a myriad of fronts. These include a deeper understanding of our inherent value as God’s people, the redemptive value of our labor, and the eternal and incomparable value of the proof of work of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.

As we hold the monetary plumb line of Bitcoin up against everything else, it is revelatory and all sorts of new perspectives come to light about God’s character and his created order. I think this is why we have seen atheists come to faith in Christ as a result of studying Bitcoin.

I do not think anyone knows if Satoshi was a Christian, or had a Christian worldview. Regardless, by virtue of applying engineering principles that abide by God’s created standards to design Bitcoin, Satoshi most definitely submitted to God’s engineering laws of value and value creation.

It seems that the maxim, “all truth is God’s truth,” could be aptly applied here. To Michael Saylor’s point, this is why engineering is an “honorable, ethical, life-affirming profession,” because God is honorable, ethical, and life-affirming. This is evidenced by the creation of Bitcoin which offers a haven for the marginalized and most vulnerable of society.

Let’s remember that Bitcoin is simply a tool to account for, and measure, value by God’s standards. By virtue of that, it serves to expose the corruption of monetary debasement and provide a haven for the most vulnerable and exploited people. It is a monetary plumb line by which God will judge and redeem.