The Sabbath Year
This is the third in a series on the Jubilee Year of 2025.
We learned last week about the importance of the Jewish Sabbath, a day of rest from work in honor of God’s liberation of Israel from slavery in order to regain the gifts of Eden: God’s forgiveness, total freedom, a family relationship with their Creator, and the fullness of God’s blessing. Building on this idea of the weekly sabbath, there was the ‘Sabbatical’ or sabbath year. God commanded that every seven years the following activities should take place: the land should be left fallow, debts should be cancelled, indentured servants should be released, and the Law should be read. Let’s look at each of these in turn.
We moderns find the command to rest once every seven days burdensome and hard to fulfill. Imagine as a farmer being told that every seventh year you should not sow or prune or reap what is in your fields, but let whatever grows grow! The phrasing is curious: “the land shall keep a sabbath to the LORD” (Lev. 25:2). The land, just like man, needs its rest, and it doesn’t cooperate when it is worked too hard (just ask the survivors of the Dust Bowl). Trust that God will provide is encouraged with this practice, as is the promotion of social justice because whatever is on the land is also for the poor to eat (Ex. 23:10-11).
God also commanded that social relations be reorganized every seventh year. Whatever debt you had accrued during the past seven years should be cancelled by your creditor to symbolize God’s redeeming work in the Exodus (Deut. 15:2). If your debt was so great that you sold yourself as an indentured servant, that debt cancellation meant your freedom from servitude (Ex. 21:2). God redeemed, he paid the price, for Israel’s freedom from slavery, and so no one should be kept in servitude longer than the seven years. Upon release, they should be given food and drink and livestock with which to start their new life. Imagine a justice system that valued human dignity so highly! Finally, every seven years the people were commanded to assemble and hear the entirety of the Law proclaimed to them so that they could remember what God had done for them and how he wanted them to act as a result (Deut. 31:9-13).
What can we learn from the Sabbath year? God offers us his gift of forgiveness and frees us from our slavery to sin. He has invited us into a family relationship with him and filled us with his blessings. We respond by 1) trusting in his providential plan by not succumbing to workaholism, 2) not holding financial or emotional debts over others or 3) holding another hostage in unforgiveness, and 4) learning his Law to better enact it in our lives. But wait, there’s more! We’ll learn about an even more radical societal reorganization that happened every seven sabbath (50 years), the jubilee!