Subscribe to Ailbe Newsletters
Sign up to receive our email newsletters and read columns about revival, renewal, and awakening built upon prayer, sharing, and mutual edification.
Just as the people were expected to rest every seven days, so they were expected to let the land rest every seven years. The land itself was to have a Sabbath. This must have seemed a strange mandate to the people. We have no evidence they ever kept it. Indeed, it is precisely because they did not – for 490 years – that they were taken into 70 years of captivity, so that the land could have its rest.
Farmers know the importance of resting arable land. This is why they rotate crops, allowing land to lie fallow and to gather its strength for another round. There is in this Sabbath rest for the land a principle of careful stewardship of arable soil which remains valid to this day. It is this principle which yet abides, not the specific injunction of seventh-year rest for the land.
T. M. Moore
The Law of God is the soil which, fertilized by the rest of God’s Word and watered by His Spirit, brings forth the fruit of Christian life. If you’d like to understand this process better, and how to make best use of the Law in your walk with and work for the Lord, order the book, The Ground for Christian Ethics, from our online store.
Except as indicated, Scripture taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.