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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Dr. Wes Bredenhof > God graciously grants liberty | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) All songs are from the CanRC/FRCA Book of Praise Psalm 149:1,2 Hymn 82:3 (after the law of God) Psalm 68:2,3 Psalm 107:1,2,6 Hymn 81 Scripture reading: Luke 4:16-30 Text: Leviticus 25:8-17 |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
Imagine for a moment an Israelite man named Yitzhak. Yitzhak is from the tribe of Dan. He has gotten himself into deep financial trouble. He made some bad choices. But he also had some things just not go his way. One year his crops failed. Another year half of his cattle gave birth to still-born calves. Things were getting grim. He was getting deeper and deeper in debt. There was less and less money for food. How was he going to support his wife and six young children?
Living in the Promised Land, Yitzhak had a plot of land in the territory of Dan. It had been in his family for several generations. But then he had to sell it in order to pay off his debts. The land was gone. But that still didn’t pay off all the debts.
So Yitzhak had to sell himself to another Israelite as a servant. Year by year, he would try to slowly work off the debt. At least he and his family would have food and shelter, enough to stay alive.
Perhaps you can relate to poor Yitzhak. Perhaps you’ve been in a situation where you’ve had crippling debt and there didn’t seem to be a way out. It can feel like you’re trapped, like you’re in a form of slavery. There’s a reason why Proverbs 22:7 says, “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.”
But let’s say there was a way out. Let’s say God had graciously given a way for people to escape slavery to debt. That’s what the Jubilee in Leviticus 25 was all about. It was about how God has pity on his people who have been trapped by crippling debt. So I preach to you God’s Word on the Jubilee and we’ll see how God graciously grants liberty. We’ll look at:
- Why
- How
- When
Throughout Leviticus, we learn that God had his hand on the Israelite calendar. There were set feasts to be commemorated each year. There was a Sabbath day to be remembered each week. At the beginning of Leviticus 25, we read that there was also to be a Sabbath year. Every seventh year was a Sabbath year. The Israelites were to let the land rest. So they wouldn’t sow or reap at all in that seventh year.
You might think that the main reason for doing this was practical. After all, even today farmers know that letting the land lay unworked for a season is good for the land. You let it lay fallow and it improves the soil quality, improves water retention, and ultimately gives higher yields. Perhaps that was part of God’s motivation for a Sabbath year. But the greatest reason had to do with the people themselves. Every seventh year they would have to trust that God would provide. If you skip ahead to verses 18 to 22, you find that God promised that if his people would follow these laws, they would be provided for in the seventh year. Verse 21 says, “I will command my blessing on you in the sixth year, so that it will produce a crop sufficient for three years.” It was a matter of faith.
Then after every seven cycles of Sabbath years, there was to be an extra special year. This was the Jubilee year. Our English word “Jubilee” comes from the Hebrew word used here. The English word has come to mean a 50th anniversary of something or just “a season or occasion of general rejoicing.” In Hebrew the word refers to the ram’s horn that would have been used as the “loud trumpet” that would have announced the beginning of the Jubilee on the Day of Atonement. When that horn sounded, it would have been the sweetest sound in the world to those who were waiting for it. It would have been the sound of liberty for the financially oppressed.
The reason for this Jubilee feast after every 49 years had everything to do with what God is like. There are two important attributes or qualities of God that relate to the Jubilee.
One is God’s sovereignty. Sovereignty refers to his almighty rule over everything. That included the land on which the Israelites dwelt. It wasn’t their land. Verse 23 drives home that point: “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me.” With the Jubilee provisions, God wanted to make it clear to his people that they were guests on his land. He owned it all and therefore he had the right to determine what would be done with it. If God wanted to grant liberty in relation to the land, he had the right to do so.
Another attribute of God behind all this is his grace. Grace is when God grants the opposite of what people deserve. In his grace, God delivers people who don’t deserve it from oppression and he brings them into liberty. He did this when he delivered his people from slavery in Egypt. And as an ongoing reminder that he is the God who graciously delivers from bondage, he gave his people these Jubilee laws. These laws would remind them that God pities his people, even though they’re sinful and don’t deserve it.
Loved ones, another important attribute of God is his immutability. That means he never changes. The God whose sovereignty was behind the Jubilee is still sovereign today. Nothing in this world really belongs to us in an ultimate sense. Everything we have belongs to the sovereign God. He has the right to determine what is done with what belongs to him. The God whose grace was behind the Jubilee is still gracious today. God continues to set captives free from slavery to Satan, sin, and death. The Jubilee reminds us of how God is a saving God, one who rescues the undeserving from the worst trouble imaginable.
The Jubilee is also a reminder of how God can be trusted. Just like with the Sabbath years, during the Jubilee the people weren’t supposed to work the land. They had to trust God to provide. If they would follow these laws, he promised he would provide. God is dependable and faithful to his promises. And there too, he hasn’t changed. Still today, we can and must count on him to carry us through life’s ups and downs.
All of this comes into even clearer view when we look closer at how God graciously granted liberty in the Jubilee.
The fiftieth year was to be consecrated, dedicated to God as a special year. As part of that, liberty would be proclaimed to every Israelite. That had two aspects to it. We can look at those two aspects by considering how they would have applied to Yitzhak from the introduction.
First, come the year of Jubilee, Yitzhak would have been set free from his being a servant to pay off his debt. His debt would have been erased, wiped off the books. He would have had a fresh start. It would have been a time of great joy for any Israelite in those circumstances. They would have praised God for his pity and grace!
Second, when the year of Jubilee arrived, Yitzhak would have gone back to his family plot in the tribe of Dan. It would have come back into his possession and so he could work it again for himself and his family. In fact, the whole idea of selling your property when you ran into financial trouble wasn’t even really selling. It was more like leasing. And the leasing was done according to the number of crops left until the year of Jubilee. If there were more years, more was paid. So if there were 10 years left until the Jubilee, you would receive a payment equal to 10 crops. If there were 40 years, it was equal to 40 crops. This system ensured that the people understood that the land didn’t belong to them. It belonged to God and he had distributed it to the tribes and they were to respect that. There were allowances for that type of lease system, but there was also an allowance for the poor to get back to their land and start over. God graciously put limits on how long a person could continue in poverty and slavery related to debt.
Notice how the Jubilee year began on the Day of Atonement. The Day of Atonement spoke not only of propitiation, but also expiation. Propitiation is the turning away of God’s wrath and the return of his favour. Expiation refers to the cancellation of sin and its guilt. Expiation is the wiping away of sin, the removal of it from God’s people. With these things, the Day of Atonement represented a fresh start spiritually speaking. The people were clean, the priests were clean, and so was the tabernacle.
Just as the Day of Atonement was a fresh start spiritually, the year of Jubilee was a fresh start financially and socially. God doesn’t allow oppression and slavery to go on endlessly. He hears the cries of his people and pities them. He graciously provides a way out.
But there was a huge problem. Sadly, God’s people never put the Jubilee into practice. You will search in vain for any mention of a celebration of the Jubilee anywhere in the Old Testament. There’s some indication that Sabbath years might have been practiced at certain points, but not the Jubilee. So, sadly, the story of Yitzhak is a completely fictional story, at least in terms of how it ends. There very well could have been an Israelite like him who lost his land and had to sell himself into servitude. But in the real world the land would have been lost to him permanently and he may have had little hope of ever getting out of his servitude.
Instead of practicing the Jubilee, God’s people exploited one another. God said in verse 17, “You shall not wrong one another,” but the Israelites later became experts at doing exactly that. In Isaiah 5:8, God called out the Israelites who were hoarding real estate, adding houses and fields at the expense of the poor. In Amos 2, God confronted his people who were trampling down the poor into the dust of the earth. One of the ways they were doing this was buying and selling Israelite slaves. There was injustice and oppression. And because the Jubilee wasn’t practiced, there was no way out for anyone. This is one of the reasons why God sent his people into Exile in Assyria and later Babylon.
So when it comes to the “when” of the Jubilee, the Old Testament is a write-off. Of course, there was nothing wrong with the Jubilee legislation itself. It was good, gracious, and just. But the problem was with God’s people. The Jubilee was just too much grace. Sinful people love grace for themselves, but don’t so much like showing grace to others. Certainly not the extravagant grace of the Jubilee.
It’s really quite remarkable how the Old Testament describes not only many evil kings, but also some really good ones. We can think particularly of Hezekiah and Josiah. They were a couple of the best kings God’s people had ever known. But while they both introduced good godly reforms in the land, neither of them ever proclaimed a Jubilee. Why not? It would have been too much, too far, too difficult. Perhaps they were afraid that the people would rise up and revolt, especially the rich with the most to lose. Grace is always costly to the one who shows grace and they weren’t willing to pay the cost.
However, the prophet Isaiah forecasted that someone would come “to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favour.” He spoke about that in Isaiah 61. The Spirit of the LORD would be upon this servant of God. He would bring good news to the poor. He would proclaim liberty to the captives. He would bring restoration and grace. A fresh start.
It would take about 700 years for that prophecy to be fulfilled. Jesus came to Nazareth, to his hometown. He went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day. There he read from Isaiah’s prophecy. Then he announced, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus is not only the fulfillment of Isaiah 61, he’s the fulfillment of the Jubilee. What was never realized in Israel’s Old Testament history was finally realized in him.
Christ came to proclaim good news to the poor, liberty to the captives. In him, there is complete release from the debt of sin. If you believe in him, what you owe to God has been paid by him. You’re now free. Moreover, what has been lost is going to be restored. In the fall of Adam and Eve, we lost Paradise, we lost living in fellowship with God in this world he created. We lost the place God had given us to live with him. But in Christ, we have restoration. We’re heading for a place in the new creation. It’s way better than what we lost. What we gain in Christ the Second Adam is far more than what we lost in the First Adam. The new creation will be our place to dwell forever and we’ll never be able to lose it and no one will ever be able to take it from us. This is the gospel of the Jubilee as it’s fulfilled in Christ.
The Jubilee Spirit that was upon Christ is upon us too. Through the Spirit and through faith, Christians are united to the one who fulfills the Jubilee. That’s got to have practical implications for our lives. If Christ was the real Jubilee man, then we’re supposed to be Jubilee people too. We’re called to reflect him and what he’s like.
What does it look like to be Jubilee people today? First of all, this connects to our evangelistic calling. Christ proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favour, he proclaimed himself as the one who came to bring liberty and freedom to those oppressed by sin. If we’re united to Christ, we too are called to point to Christ as the one in whom there is freedom. We tell whoever we can: through Christ you can be free from the debt you owe to God for your sins. The debt can be completely wiped away. You don’t have to carry that burden any longer. If you believe in Christ, you’ll experience the liberty God graciously grants. Moreover, if you believe in Christ, you also have an inheritance waiting for you. You’ll have a place in the new heavens and new earth. You’ll be able to live there forever in perfect fellowship with God, experiencing eternal joy in him. So being Jubilee people means first proclaiming this like Christ proclaimed it.
A second way of being Jubilee people relates to grace and forgiveness. Jesus taught us to pray, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” We show the evidence of understanding the magnitude of God’s forgiveness of our debts as we go and forgive others their debts against us. Christ didn’t have any of his own sins to seek God’s forgiveness for. Nonetheless, he forgave others generously and graciously. He gave himself for others so they could be forgiven by God. Being Jubilee people means, first, we understand how much grace and forgiveness we’ve been shown by God for our debts. But then further, we’re going to extend that same kind of grace and forgiveness to others for their debts against us. When someone does you wrong, if they ask for your forgiveness, you remember how Christ has forgiven you, and you let it go, you forgive them. If they don’t ask for your forgiveness, you still remember how God has forgiven you even for sins you haven’t asked him to forgive you for, and you still have a heart that would be willing to forgive. For us as Christians today, the Jubilee means letting God’s abounding grace spill over into our lives and how we relate to other people.
A final way of being Jubilee people relates to money. We live in a much different world when it comes to financial debt, so the provisions of the Jubilee don’t apply directly to us. But there is a principle we can transfer over and work with. The principle again has to do with Jesus and how he fulfills the Jubilee. In 2 Corinthians 8:9, the Holy Spirit says, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” Paul uses that spiritual truth to spur the Corinthian Christians on to generosity with their finances. If the Jubilee had been enacted, it would have meant that rich people would have had to give up some of their wealth for the benefit of the poor. Christ fulfilled that, not by giving up some of his wealth, but all of it. He gave up his whole precious life as the Son of God for the sake of the spiritually poor. Now as those who are united to him by faith, God wants us also to be generous in our giving for those who are impoverished or struggling. We do that in our offerings for the needy, but also in our offerings for other causes. Loved ones, be Jubilee people and give as you’re able and willing, remembering also that Scripture says, “God loves a cheerful giver.”
Let me also say something to anyone who is currently experiencing a financial crisis. The same God who graciously ordained the Jubilee is the same God who fulfilled it gloriously in Christ. And today he shows himself to be the same in the office of deacon. Deacons are God’s gift to his church to witness to his ongoing care and mercy for his people. The deacons are there to support those who find themselves in a tough spot. You can go to them and they can help. They might not be able to pay off all your debt for you, but they can give you the support you need to figure out a way forward. They can pray with you and also give you practical direction from God’s Word. The Jubilee was meant to be a ministry of mercy and that’s exactly what the deacons are for today.
Our Israelite man, poor Yitzhak, never heard the ram’s horn trumpet loudly and announce the Jubilee. Christians, however, have heard the clear announcement of Christ’s fulfillment of it. It cheers our hearts with the gospel and motivates us to live accordingly. And some glorious day we’ll hear the sound of the trumpet of God as our Lord Jesus himself descends from heaven to proclaim the ultimate Jubilee. Aren’t you looking forward to that? I sure am. AMEN.
PRAYER
Heavenly Father,
We praise you for revealing to us your sovereignty and your grace in the Jubilee. We thank you for pitying those who are oppressed and in slavery. You have pitied us and set us free in Christ, and for that we’ll be forever grateful. Thank you that Jesus came to fulfill the Jubilee, that he came to set captives free, and to proclaim liberty. Please help us with your Holy Spirit to be Jubilee people living in union with him. Please help us to proclaim our Saviour as the one who provides freedom to the enslaved. Strengthen us with your grace so that we can show grace to others. And please also give us generous and gracious hearts with the finances you’ve entrusted to us, so that also with our money we can show your heart of grace reflected in the Jubilee. We pray for anyone who might be experiencing financial trouble too. We pray that you would show them your mercy and provide a way out for them. And Father, we pray for the return of our Lord Jesus, for that day when the final trumpet sounds and we enter into the great end-times Jubilee. Please bring that day quickly.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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