Sabbath, July 25, 2009
Leviticus 25:8-24
“You shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall give you forty-nine years. Then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the Day of Atonement you shall sound the trumpet throughout all your land. And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his clan. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; in it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of itself nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you. You may eat the produce of the field.
“In this year of jubilee each of you shall return to his property. And if you make a sale to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. You shall pay your neighbor according to the number of years after the jubilee, and he shall sell to you according to the number of years for crops. If the years are many, you shall increase the price, and if the years are few, you shall reduce the price, for it is the number of the crops that he is selling to you. You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear your God, for I am the Lord your God.
“Therefore you shall do my statutes and keep my rules and perform them, and then you will dwell in the land securely. The land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and dwell in it securely. And if you say, ‘What shall we eat in the seventh year, if we may not sow or gather in our crop?’ I will command my blessing on you in the sixth year, so that it will produce a crop sufficient for three years. When you sow in the eighth year, you will be eating some of the old crop; you shall eat the old until the ninth year, when its crop arrives.
“The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me. And in all the country you possess, you shall allow a redemption of the land. (ESV)
by John H. Camenga
Even as we sing, “He owns the cattle on a thousand hills,” we must remember that God owns each and every one of those hills as well. For the people of God in the Land of Israel, God made clear that the land was his to distribute and that no one was to think of buy or selling the land. Instead, they were to think, “We are buying and selling the crops this land will produce until the next Jubilee.” Instead of thinking of themselves as owners, the people were to think of themselves as aliens and sojourners with God.
Think about how what you own may redirect your attention from God and his work. Is God, through the example of the Year of Jubilee, calling you to make significant changes in your life?
Copyright Information
Daily Bible Meditations are taken from The Helping Hand,a Sabbath School student quarterly for youth and adults. Copyright © 2010, Seventh Day Baptist Board of Christian Education, Inc.
Scripture quotations marked "ESV" are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Text provided by the Crossway Bibles Web Service.
