Ownership
I pulled this quote
out of Warren Wiersbe’s book called Expository
Outlines of the Old Testament. I
think it is important to understand the mindset of the Jewish people with
respect to “rights” and “property ownership.”
It is foreign to us as Americans.
In fact, it is really foreign to most of Christianity. We will all read this as say, “Oh, yeah,
that’s totally true.” But we don’t live
accordingly for the most part. Instead
of paraphrasing and taking the credit myself, better to give you the original
source:
The economic system in Israel was
based on three fundamental principles: (1) God owned the land and had a right
to control it, Leviticus 25:23; (2) God owned the people, because He had
redeemed them from Egyptian bondage, Leviticus 25:38, 42, 55; and (3) the Jews
were a family (“your brother,” nkjv)
and should care for each other, Leviticus 25:25, 35–36, 39, 47. Joshua and the
Jewish army conquered the land of Canaan, but it was God who assigned their
inheritance (Joshua 13–21). The people “possessed” the land and enjoyed its
products, but God owned it and determined how it would be used.
I also happen to be
reading a book called “Weird” by Craig Groeschel. Craig makes a great point in that book about
the first part of this chapter. I don’t
have the book, so I’m going to have to paraphrase this one. Craig asks a very interesting question: How
many businesses do you know that are open for six years and then take a year
off? How many businesses do you know of
that are open six days and take a Sabbath?
{I can only think of two:
Chik-fil-A and most mom-and-pop restaurants} No, we think of business and work as a time
to make money. But isn’t that the same
as the purpose of farming? You use the
land to grow crops and be able to live.
God knows the earth needs time off.
So do employees. So do
businesses. It sounds really strange,
but I wonder how many businesses would thrive with satisfied employees if they
knew that every seven years they would get a year-long break from their
work?
After all, this is
where the term Sabbatical is ultimately derived!
Oh, and for the
record we should realize that today even farmers don’t let the land go fallow
too often. Instead, we have devised a
way of rotating crops to keep the land from being deprived of the same nutrients
year after year. Somehow, though, I
still don’t think crop rotation can do for the land what God can do by giving
it a year off.
The Year of Jubilee
The Year of Jubilee
is one of my favorite concepts. Jubilee
is this time when we honor a Sabbath of Sabbaths. 7 groups of seven years are spoken of here –
the year after that is Jubilee! I think
that’s a pretty amazing concept, to be truthful. What happens in Jubilee? Well, it is like hitting a giant reset
button. Anything that was yours during
the last Jubilee becomes yours again.
Automatically.
Just because it is
God’s and God wants it to go back to the family to whom it was given. That’s a really neat concept. It’s like saying that you can never
completely lose your home or your children or anything that belongs to
you. You can sell it for a time if you
absolutely have to sell it, but you know that on Jubilee it comes right back to
you. In a way, what it really does is
indicate that things like selling property forever becomes impossible. Instead of selling land, you really lease it
to another person until the year of Jubilee cycles around again.
Why is this process
the way that it is? Simply put, because
the Jewish people knew that they did not ultimately own the land
themselves. God was the owner of the
land. They were merely its
occupants. So in the year of Jubilee
when the hypothetical “reset button” is pushed, nobody had any right to
complain. It was all God’s property; He
has the right to divide it how He wants.
See? I told you that this idea of land ownership
is absolutely foreign to most Americans!
But imagine how much stress we could avoid in life if we actually lived
this out? How much could we avoid in
life if we didn’t have the pressure of accumulating and protecting our wealth
because we understood and lived that it is really all God’s wealth anyway?
Oh, and for the
record, the Hebrew people worked this into their financial system. Just to give an example, let’s say that a
person was poor but had a parcel of land.
The person could sell the land to a neighbor for a sum of money (to make
it simple, let’s say $49,000 - $1,000 for each year between the years of
Jubilee. If the person sells the land
immediately following Jubilee, he would get that price. But if the person sold the land with only 22
years left until Jubilee, the cost would be decreased accordingly – in my
example it would now be $22,000. This
makes sense, because in the first example the buyer knows he gets the land for
49 years while in the second example the buyer knows he’s only getting the land
for 22 years. Oh, how wonderful life is
when we live as though it is all God’s anyway.
Land versus Cities
Also notice that God
seems to care about the land, not the cities.
The reason is that in an agricultural setting the land is the key to
life. One house inside a city is like
another. God doesn’t care which house a
person lives in within a city – so long as they have a dwelling to call their
own. But God does care if a person outside
the city is stripped of their only means to survive as the rich no doubt would
scheme to buy up and control all the land.
No, that doesn’t sound at all familiar, does it?
Indentured Servants
Finally, notice that
this chapter provides for the measure of what we would call today “indentured
servitude.” A person could sell
themselves into essential slavery, but only for a time. In the year of Jubilee, all such Hebrew
servants were free with their whole families.
While this might seem archaic and a hint back to slavery, if done right
it is a boon to the poor of the land.
Let’s say that you
are having a hard time finding a job and caring for your family. So you arrange to have you and your family serve
someone who can afford to care for both their family and your family. You serve them dutifully; they treat you with
the respect that servants deserve.
This is usually the
place where slavery and servitude breaks down.
Masters – shoot, humans in general – have a hard time treating people
underneath them with any sort of respect at all! But so long as the wealthy person maintained
respect and cared for the families while the poor man maintained the appointed
work, the system should work beautifully.
{And no, this isn’t an endorsement
of slavery and indentured servitude. It
is an endorsement of human beings getting along and calling for underlings / employees
/ servant to dutifully do the work and for masters / employers / owners to
uphold their agreements and treat people with respect.}
I really love the
concept of Jubilee and the idea that God owns everything. I hope in reading this that you were able to
fall in love with the concept yourself.
God’s peace.
Oh, and Happy
Easter! He is risen!
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