“The sabbath produce of the land shall be food for you, for your male and female slaves, for your hired servant, and for the sojourner who lives with you. For your cattle also and for the animals that are in your land, all its produce shall be for food” (vv. 6-7). This signifies that it is all a matter of grace toward anyone, regardless of his status.
In the seventh year the produce of the land became common. Although the land still belonged to its owners, what the land produced belonged to everyone, to every kind of person, and even to the cattle and all the animals. This means that the produce of the land was common. We may say that this is God’s communism, a communism that results from the grace of God and that makes us rich, not the human communism that is forced upon people and makes them poor. In this common enjoyment of the produce of the land, there is real freedom.
“If you should say, What shall we eat in the seventh year if we do not sow or gather in our crops? Then I will command My blessing on you in the sixth year, so that it will yield a sufficient crop for three years. When you sow in the eighth year, you will eat of the old crop until the ninth year; until its produce comes in, you will eat the old” (vv. 20-22). This signifies that the sufficient grace of God surpasses our need threefold.
Forced communism is against God’s will. According to God’s will, we should have a proper enjoyment of all things that are in common. The possession of the land is not common, for the land still belongs to each owner. What is common is the produce of the land in the seventh year. In this year everything produced by the land becomes common for the purpose of enjoyment. For this purpose, God blesses the land to produce food threefold. This practice of keeping the sabbath year ushers us into the jubilee.
According to Young’s Concordance, the Hebrew word for jubilee means a time of shouting. This shouting is, of course, not of mourning but of rejoicing; it is a joyful shouting.
God realized that in ancient times there was, economically speaking, the need for natural resources to be balanced among the children of Israel. After the Israelites entered into the good land, the land was divided among them by lots. None of these lots was to be sold permanently. Rather, in the year of jubilee any lots that had been sold were to be returned to the original owners.
During the years before the jubilee, some of the people might not have been able to keep their property. Because of poverty or illness they might have been forced to sell their property in whole or in part. However, at the time of jubilee, at the time of shouting, the land reverted to its owner. This return of the land was God’s way of balancing the ownership of land among the people. Thus there could not be any landlords, for in God’s wisdom the divine regulation, the divine ordinance, was a balance of the natural resources. This ordinance was to be put into effect every fifty years. From this we see that thirty-five centuries ago, a long time before Marx invented communism, God made provision in the holy Word for the balance of the land. Every fifty years, without the original owners doing anything or paying anything, the land was returned to them and once again became their possession.
In type, the jubilee portrays our situation as poor sinners. Our situation was that the longer we lived, the more we lost of our divinely allotted portion. Because we lived in a sinful way, we lost the divine rights. The more we committed sin, the more of these rights we lost. Eventually, we sold all that we had inherited by birth. We even lost ourselves. We sold ourselves not to a proper buyer but to Satan and sin. This was the reason Paul could say, “I am fleshly, sold under sin” (Rom. 7:14b). Lake Paul, we also were slaves sold to sin; we had lost to Satan our rights. We should not consider Satan and sin two separate things. These two are one. Therefore, when we sold ourselves to sin, we sold ourselves to Satan and thus fell into the hands of Satan under sin. As descendants of Adam, we all had sold the rights allotted to us by God and even sold ourselves to sin and Satan. Furthermore, we could do nothing about our situation; we did not have the means to redeem ourselves. We were hopeless. Then one day, jubilee came.
In Luke 4:18 and 19 the Lord Jesus proclaimed the jubilee with words of grace (see Life-study of Luke, Messages Twelve and Sixty-four through Sixty-nine). When He came, jubilee came with Him. Christ has accomplished the full redemption of God for sinners. Now when we preach the gospel, we make a proclamation of the New Testament jubilee.
The jubilee is not a Pentecostal day but a Pentecostal year. The principle is the same here as with the sabbath year. Elsewhere we read of the sabbath day, but in Leviticus 25 we have the sabbath year. Likewise, elsewhere Pentecost is a day, but here we have the Pentecostal year.
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