Ese’s company packaged palm oil in a small factory off Sapele Road in Benin City. He bought crude oil in bulk from mills in Edo and Delta, filtered and bottled it, and sold it in five-litre and twenty-five-litre kegs to wholesalers, supermarkets and the market women who resold it by the bottle. The kegs carried a bright red label with a picture of a palm tree and the company’s name in gold letters: Divine Grace Foods. Underneath, in smaller letters, was a verse from Psalm 23.
One morning his production supervisor came to him with a calculator and a proposal. Palm oil prices had climbed for the third time that year. Margins were thin. But there was a simple solution. If the filling machine was set to dispense 4.7 litres into each “five-litre” keg instead of five, the company would save about three hundred millilitres a keg. Across four thousand kegs a month, the saving came to more than a thousand litres, worth nearly three million naira.
“Oga, everybody does it,” the supervisor said. “Go to the market and measure any brand you like. The customers do not check. And even if they check, what will they do? It is the same for everyone.”
Ese hesitated. Then he thought about the eleven people on his payroll, the loan he was still repaying on the filtration equipment, and the competitor down the road who was already selling cheaper. He told the supervisor to adjust the machine “for now, until prices come down.”
Prices did not come down. Six months later, on a Friday evening, he stopped on the way home from a church committee meeting to buy akara from a woman who fried bean cakes at the junction near his church. She had been there for years. He liked her. While he waited for his order, he watched her pour oil from a new five-litre keg into a plastic jug she had marked with lines of black tape. She frowned at it, shook the keg, and poured again.
“Short again,” she said, to nobody in particular. Then she saw him watching and held up the keg with its red label. “My brother, look. Every month my oil finishes before Thursday. So I started measuring. Even Divine Grace has started doing it. If Christians are doing it too, who do we trust?”
She did not know who he was. He paid for his akara, said goodnight and drove home with the bag on the passenger seat. He told me he did not eat it.
Who pays for the shortcut
Ese had thought of the adjustment as a business decision. Margins, costs, competition. What he had not done was follow the three hundred millilitres to where they ended up. They ended up at a junction near his church, in the frying pan of a woman whose oil ran out before Thursday, who had to buy another keg sooner, and who made a little less profit on every bean cake she sold to schoolchildren and labourers on their way home.
That is the nature of nearly every dishonest shortcut in business. It looks like profit. In reality it is a transfer. The cost does not disappear; it is moved quietly onto someone else, usually someone with less power and less information than the person making the decision. The short measure is paid for by the customer. The padded invoice is paid for by the client, and if the client is a government agency, by every taxpayer. The substandard material is paid for by whoever lives or works in the building. The unrecorded sale is paid for by the public services that taxes are meant to fund.
Scripture speaks to this with remarkable bluntness:
A false balance is abomination to the LORD : but a just weight is his delight.
The two halves of the verse are carefully balanced. “A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight.” Abomination is one of the strongest words in the Hebrew Bible, used elsewhere for idolatry and gross immorality. Delight is the word for something that gives pleasure and favour. God has strong feelings about the market. He does not regard the weighing of grain, the measuring of oil or the pricing of goods as morally neutral activities outside His interest. He detests the false measure and takes pleasure in the honest one.
Notice that the verse does not say God tolerates the honest weight. He delights in it. A trader who fills each keg to the line is doing something that brings God pleasure. That is a dignity that should change the way believers think about ordinary commerce.
Just measures and the God who redeems
The law of Moses addresses commercial honesty in the middle of its great chapter on holiness. Leviticus 19 opens with the words, “Ye shall be holy: for I the LORD your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). The chapter that follows includes instructions on worship, on leaving gleanings for the poor, on paying wages promptly, on not cursing the deaf or tripping the blind, on loving your neighbour as yourself, and on welcoming the stranger. And then, near the end:
Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure. Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall ye have: I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.
Look at the range. “In meteyard,” measures of length, like cloth or land. “In weight,” like gold, silver or grain. “In measure,” quantities of volume. The ephah was a dry measure for grain and the hin a liquid measure for oil and wine. God’s people were to be honest in every kind of measurement used in their economy. If Moses had been writing in Benin City, he might have mentioned the five-litre keg.
Then comes the reason, and it is the most important line in the passage: “I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Israel had been a nation of slaves. They had known what it meant to have their labour exploited and their lives measured out by people who did not care about them. Now God had redeemed them. Their honesty in business was to flow from their redemption. A redeemed people must not become exploiters.
The New Covenant believer stands in a deeper version of the same story. We have been redeemed from sin and death by the blood of Christ. Grace has made us holy in Him, and holiness reaches all the way into the factory and the shop. Our business ethics express a salvation we have already received.
It is no accident that the same chapter contains the command, “thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). Honest measures are what neighbour love looks like at a market stall. Jesus put the same principle in a form that every trader can apply at the counter: “all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12). Ese would have been furious to discover that his own supplier had been sending him short drums of crude oil. The question every business owner can ask is simple. Would I accept this measure, this invoice, this quality or this delay if I were the one on the other side of the counter?
Deuteronomy adds a detail that describes Ese’s situation exactly:
Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small. Thou shalt not have in thine house divers measures, a great and a small. But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and just measure shalt thou have: that thy days may be lengthened in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. For all that do such things, and all that do unrighteously, are an abomination unto the LORD thy God.
“Divers weights, a great and a small.” The dishonest merchant kept two sets: a heavy one for buying and a light one for selling. He received more than he paid for and gave less than he was paid for. Today the “two sets of weights” might be two sets of books, two invoices or two standards of quality, one for the inspector and one for everyone else. God’s verdict has not changed: “all that do such things, and all that do unrighteously, are an abomination unto the LORD thy God.”
The prophets in the marketplace
Some of the hottest words of the Old Testament prophets are directed at business practices. Amos, a herdsman from Tekoa, was sent to the northern kingdom of Israel at a time of great prosperity. The markets were busy. The religious festivals were well attended. And underneath both, the poor were being crushed:
Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail, Saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit? That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; yea , and sell the refuse of the wheat?
Look at what the merchants were saying. “When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat?” They kept the religious days. They did not open their shops on the sabbath. But they were impatient for worship to end so that they could get back to cheating. Their religion was a pause in their dishonesty.
And look at their methods: “making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit.” A small ephah meant the customer received less grain. A great shekel meant the weight used to measure the customer’s silver was heavier, so he paid more. They cheated on both sides of the transaction. Then: “sell the refuse of the wheat.” They mixed the sweepings from the threshing floor into the grain they sold. Adulteration is not a modern invention.
God’s response follows immediately: “Surely I will never forget any of their works” (Amos 8:7). The customers may have forgotten. The merchants may have stopped noticing. God remembered every short measure.
Micah asked the same question in the south: “Shall I count them pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful weights?” (Micah 6:11). The answer is obvious. No amount of public religion makes a crooked scale clean.
PunchlineA short measure is never just a business decision. It is a quiet transfer of cost onto someone who trusted you, and God remembers every one.
A religious label on an unjust deal
This brings us to the most uncomfortable point. Ese’s kegs carried the name Divine Grace and a verse from the Psalms. Many Nigerian businesses carry similar names: God’s Time Enterprises, Blessed Assurance Ventures, Jesus Is Lord Motors. There is nothing wrong with that. A business owner may sincerely want to honour God publicly. But a religious label does not make a transaction just. In some ways it raises the stakes, because the customer who trusts the label is trusting the name of God.
Hosea gives a portrait of a merchant who had convinced himself that all was well:
He is a merchant, the balances of deceit are in his hand: he loveth to oppress. And Ephraim said, Yet I am become rich, I have found me out substance: in all my labours they shall find none iniquity in me that were sin.
“The balances of deceit are in his hand: he loveth to oppress.” And then his self-justification: “Yet I am become rich... in all my labours they shall find none iniquity in me that were sin.” His prosperity had become his proof of innocence. Because the business was growing, he assumed God approved of it. Nobody could find anything that “were sin.”
That mindset is dangerous for believers who have been taught to read financial growth as a sign of divine favour. God does bless work and enterprise, and Scripture says so boldly. But profit gained by deceit is no evidence of His blessing. “Bread of deceit is sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel” (Proverbs 20:17).
Nor does giving sanctify dishonest gain. Some believers quietly reason that if they tithe faithfully from the profits, God will overlook how the profits were made. Scripture rejects that bargain. “To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice” (Proverbs 21:3). When Jesus drove the traders out of the temple, He said, “ye have made it a den of thieves” (Matthew 21:13). The temple was a place of worship, and it had become a place of exploitation. Religious activity can coexist with commercial injustice for a long time, but God is not deceived by the combination.
It is worth saying the same to the buyer, because dishonesty runs in both directions. “It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer: but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth” (Proverbs 20:14). The customer who lies about the condition of goods to beat down the price, the client who promises payment he has no intention of making, or the company that delays paying its small suppliers for months because it can: all of them are using unjust weights of their own.
Faithful in that which is least
Jesus spoke directly about faithfulness with money in a passage that every business owner should know:
He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much. If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches ? And if ye have not been faithful in that which is another man’s, who shall give you that which is your own?
“He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much.” Three hundred millilitres is a small thing. It would hardly fill a teacup. But Jesus says the small thing reveals the character. A businessman who will short a keg of oil has already shown what he would do with a large contract. The size of the dishonesty is not the measure of the problem. The willingness is.
“If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?” Money is a training ground. How a believer handles it reveals whether he can be entrusted with the eternal things of the kingdom. That puts business decisions in a very different light. The balance sheet becomes, among other things, a record of faithfulness.
“And if ye have not been faithful in that which is another man’s, who shall give you that which is your own?” In every honest sale, part of what passes across the counter belongs to the customer. The customer has paid for five litres. From the moment the money changes hands, those five litres are his. The three hundred millilitres that Ese’s machine kept back belonged to another man, or another woman. Calling them company savings did not change whose oil they were.
This is why Christian business ethics cannot be reduced to a list of rules about what you must not do. They are a matter of stewardship. Everything in the business is held in trust: the customer’s payment, the supplier’s goods, the employee’s labour, the investor’s capital and the public’s confidence. The faithful steward handles all of it as belonging to someone else, because in the end all of it belongs to God.
Promises kept, and the pressure of “settlement”
Business ethics also concern promises. A delivery date is a promise. A warranty is a promise. A description of quality is a promise. A contract is a written promise. Jesus said, “let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay” (Matthew 5:37). The psalmist describes the person who may dwell with God as “He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not” (Psalm 15:4). He keeps his word even when keeping it costs him.
That means not promising what you cannot deliver to win the order. It means telling a customer honestly when a delivery will be late, instead of switching off your phone. It means honouring a quoted price even when your costs rise, or renegotiating openly instead of quietly lowering the quality. It means paying your own suppliers on the date you agreed.
Then there is the pressure that many Nigerian business owners know all too well. A contract is available, but the procurement officer expects a percentage. The invoice must be “padded” so that the inflated figure can be shared. A permit is stuck until something is “dropped.” A competitor wins every tender because he knows whom to “settle.” This is real, it is widespread, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. It would also be unfair to suggest that every official or every business is corrupt. Many are honest and resent the system as much as anyone.
Scripture is clear on the central point: “thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and perverteth the words of the righteous” (Exodus 23:8). A bribe corrupts the person who takes it and the person who offers it, and the cost is borne by everyone who depends on fair decisions. A padded invoice is a false balance written on paper. The believer should not offer bribes, should not inflate invoices and should not falsify records, even when it means losing the contract.
There are harder situations, where a believer is not seeking an advantage but is being extorted for something he is already entitled to. Sincere Christians reach different conclusions about whether paying under duress in such a case is ever permissible, and the matter needs prayer, wise counsel and, where possible, legal advice. But there is no disagreement that a believer must never initiate corruption to gain an unfair advantage, never profit from it, and never present it as something other than it is. Wherever possible, document demands, use official channels and refuse politely.
Building honesty into the business
NuggetGood intentions are rarely enough on their own. A business that wants to be honest needs honesty built into the way it actually runs, because pressure arrives on busy days when nobody has time to think.
Notice where Ese’s temptation came from. It was his supervisor who brought the calculator. Many owners never personally tamper with anything. They simply allow a culture in which staff learn that shortcuts are welcome as long as the numbers look good. The owner who says “I do not want to know how you did it, just hit the target” has made a moral decision, whether he admits it or not. Leadership sets the measure for everyone below it.
So decide, and say plainly to your staff, what the business will and will not do. Put it in writing. Make it clear that no employee will be punished for refusing to cheat a customer, falsify a record or offer a bribe, and that anyone who brings a problem to light will be protected. Then keep that promise when it is tested.
Check your own measures. Calibrate scales and filling machines regularly and keep a record of it. Have someone other than the person who handles the cash reconcile the accounts. Keep one honest set of books, file accurate tax returns and pay what is due. Keep the business account separate from your personal spending, so that you can see clearly what belongs to whom.
And welcome scrutiny. A trusted accountant, a mentor in business or a mature believer who will ask you hard questions is a gift, not a threat. “Iron sharpeneth iron” (Proverbs 27:17). The businesses that drift furthest into dishonesty are usually the ones where nobody is allowed to ask questions of the owner.
Honest profit and the long road
None of this means that profit is suspect. Scripture praises the capable woman who “perceiveth that her merchandise is good” (Proverbs 31:18). Honest enterprise that serves real needs and earns a fair return is good and God-honouring. “Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase” (Proverbs 13:11).
Integrity in business is sometimes costly in the short term. The honest trader may lose the contract, sell a slightly more expensive keg or grow more slowly than the competitor who cheats. “Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues without right” (Proverbs 16:8). But over time, honesty builds something no shortcut can buy: trust. Customers come back. Suppliers extend credit. Staff stay. “A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches” (Proverbs 22:1).
And for those who, like Ese, have already taken the shortcut, there is grace. Christ’s blood cleanses the sin of the false balance as surely as any other. But grace leads to repair. The law required that a person who had taken something by deceit should “restore it in the principal, and shall add the fifth part more thereto” (Leviticus 6:5). Restoration will look different in each case, and it may need wise counsel, but it begins with stopping the practice and telling the truth.
On Monday morning, Ese had the filling machine recalibrated to five litres. The supervisor argued for an hour. Ese did not shout. He simply said, “We are not going to sell short any more,” and stood beside the machine until the first full kegs came off the line.
Then he did something harder. He printed a notice and sent it to every wholesaler and retailer the company supplied. It said that for six months, some kegs had been filled below the stated volume, that this had been wrong, and that from now on every keg would be full. He offered a discount on the next three orders to every regular customer, to make up something of what they had lost.
Some wholesalers laughed at him. One said, “You have just told everybody you were cheating.” Ese said, “I was.” His margins fell, and for about four months the business was very tight. He paid salaries on time, but he did not pay himself much at all.
On the second Friday after the change, he went back to the junction near his church. The woman was frying akara as usual. He waited until she had poured oil from a new keg into her marked jug. She looked at the line, then at the keg, and said, “Ah. This one is full.”
He told her who he was. She stared at him for a long moment, and then laughed so hard she had to put down her spoon. “So you are Divine Grace,” she said. “Then let it be grace.”
She still buys his oil. The business recovered, slowly, and is now larger than before. Ese told me that several new customers came to him specifically because they had heard about the notice. But that was not why he did it.
Punchline“I put God’s name on those kegs,” he said. “I had to make sure the oil inside was telling the truth.”
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- In your business or work, where might a “shortcut” actually be transferring a cost onto someone else?
- Do you keep any “divers weights,” one standard for those who check and another for those who do not?
- Have you ever treated financial growth or generous giving as proof that God approves of how the money was made?
- What promises have you made to customers, suppliers or employers that you are not currently keeping?
- If you have already taken a dishonest shortcut, what would honest repair look like in your situation?
This Week
Take one hour this week to examine your business or work practices with a pen and paper. List every place where you measure, describe, price or promise something to another person. Next to each one, write honestly whether it would pass the test of Leviticus 19:35-36. If anything does not, decide on one concrete step to correct it, and take that step before the week ends, with the help of a trusted believer if you need one.
A Prayer
Lord, You delight in a just weight, and You never forget the short measure. Forgive me for the times I have called a dishonest shortcut a business decision, and for any place where I have put Your name on something that was not telling the truth. Make me faithful in what is least, honest in every measure and true to every promise. Give me courage to put right what I have done wrong, and to trust You for provision when honesty costs me. Let my business be a place where people are served well and Your name is honoured. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.