A Year with God

Selection Taken From:
A Year with God by R.P. Nettelhorst

Make this the year you let God's Word "dwell in you richly"---and marvel at the results! Each entry in this 365-day devotional features Scripture verses in which God speaks, accompanied by insights and applications to enhance your understanding. Learn what God says about hope and fear; perseverance and quitting; companionship and isolation; and more! 384 pages, softcover from Nelson, Copyright 2010.

Free at Last

You are to count seven sabbatic years, seven times seven years, so that the time period of the seven sabbatic years amounts to 49. Then you are to sound a trumpet loudly in the seventh month, on the tenth [day] of the month; you will sound it throughout your land on the Day of Atonement. You are to consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim freedom in the land for all its inhabitants. It will be your Jubilee, when each of you are to return to his property and each of you to his clan. The fiftieth year will be your Jubilee; you are not to sow, reap what grows by itself, or harvest its untended vines. It is to be holy to you because it is the Jubilee; you may [only] eat its produce [directly] from the field.
In this Year of Jubilee, each of you will return to his property. If you make a sale to your neighbor or a purchase from him, do not cheat one another. - Leviticus 25:8-14 11 HCSB

God cares about those who have nothing left to give. In ancient Israel, people could sell their property or even themselves if they became impoverished. But every fifty years all the people enslaved were supposed to be freed during the year of Jubilee. Property was supposed to return to its original owner.

For the entire year of Jubilee, no plowing of fields, no planting of crops, and no harvesting were to be done. By taking a year off to do no work, they would face clearly what was always true: God was the source of their sustenance. Jubilee restored economic balance in the land. And it reminded the people that God really could provide for them—just as he had for the forty years of wandering in the wilderness after the exodus.

During the time of Moses and Joshua, the land had been distributed to the tribes and families of Israel. It was supposed to remain with those tribes and families for all time. Unfortunately, though God told the Israelites to "proclaim liberty throughout the land" (Leviticus 25:10 NRSV) every year of Jubilee, the harsh reality of Israelite society was that Jubilee never came.

Idolatry wasn't the only reason God brought the Babylonians against the Israelites. God also sent them into captivity because the powerful had oppressed the weak. The powerful never set anyone free. They never returned a bit of land. So the Babylonians took only a minority of Israelites into captivity—the upper classes who had oppressed the poor by denying them their Jubilees. Those whom they had oppressed were left behind. Freedom finally came as the oppressors were dragged away. God granted mercy with his judgment.