The Fourth Commandment: Statutes and Precepts (16)
Leviticus 25.8-22
8 “‘And you shall count seven sabbaths of years for yourself, seven times seven years; and the time of the seven sabbaths of years shall be to you forty-nine years. 9 Then you shall cause the trumpet of the Jubilee to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement you shall make the trumpet to sound throughout all your land. 10 And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you; and each of you shall return to his possession, and each of you shall return to his family. 11 That fiftieth year shall be a Jubilee to you; in it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of its own accord, nor gather the grapes of your untended vine. 12 For it is the Jubilee; it shall be holy to you; you shall eat its produce from the field. 13 In this Year of Jubilee, each of you shall return to his possession. 14 And if you sell anything to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor’s hand, you shall not oppress one another. 15 According to the number of years after the Jubilee you shall buy from your neighbor, and according to the number of years of crops he shall sell to you. 16 According to the multitude of years you shall increase its price, and according to the fewer number of years you shall diminish its price; for he sells to you according to the number of the years of the crops. 17 Therefore you shall not oppress one another, but you shall fear your God; for I am the LORD your God. 18 So you shall observe My statutes and keep My judgments, and perform them; and you will dwell in the land in safety. 19 Then the land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill, and dwell there in safety. 20 And if you say, “What shall we eat in the seventh year, since we shall not sow nor gather in our produce?” 21 Then I will command My blessing on you in the sixth year, and it will bring forth produce enough for three years. 22 And you shall sow in the eighth year, and eat old produce until the ninth year; until its produce comes in, you shall eat of the old harvest.’”
A whole year without working! What would that be like? In the year of Jubilee Israel was to celebrate the goodness of God and renew their covenant with Him by returning to their patriarchal lands, resting from working the soil, and treating the year as a holy Sabbath year to the Lord. The idea of a periodic renewal of our covenant relationship with God is a good one, I think. I don’t believe God intends for us to try to follow the specific economic practices He assigned to Israel in our day, but whatever principles there may be in these statutes – such as setting aside holy times for the Lord, keeping debt to a minimum, and not accumulating excessive wealth – are certainly worth reflecting on for how they might apply to us.
Notice the twin incentives for observing the year of release – the Jubilee: fear of God and love for neighbor. We may not always find aspects of God’s Law easy to understand or even agreeable. But fear of God should keep us seeking the best ways to fulfill them in our day. Love for our neighbor is hard to sustain without some meaningful guidelines. God provides these in His Law. The better we know the Law and the more consistent we are in keeping it, the more we will know the fear of God and show love to our neighbor.
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.
