1479 - “Understanding Shabbat, Sabbatical years, and Jubilee” Leviticus 25

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1479. We are looking at the story of the Crimson River, the story of redemption. And that runs deep through the book of Leviticus. When we come to Leviticus chapter 25, there are two special Moadim, two special occasions, two special appointed times when God says, I have put this on my calendar. I will meet you when you gather for these special appointment times, and I want to teach you about who I am and what I do and what I'm going to do. And so the Jews were to remember these days forever. And in chapter twenty five, verses one through seven, you have the sabbatical year, the seventh year. Now you'll recall in Leviticus twenty-three that the first of all the great Moedim, the great Moed, the appointments that God said, I want to meet with you was a weekly occurrence. God created the entire heavens and earth in six days, and on the seventh day, God named that day because it was to be special and different than any other day, and he named it Shabbat. We call it Sabbath. And so you had one, two, three, four, five, six, all that were numbered, and then one day was named. Very much unlike Western civilization, of which we are a part, that names all of the days, after Roman gods mainly. And so we have names for everything, but God had numbers. God likes numbers. Then Shabbat was the day when God said, I want you to make it special. And then God said, I want you to count just like you do days of a week, six days, I want you to count six years. Now I'm going to bless you during those days as you work the land just like I do the six days that you work each week. But just like on the seventh day, Shabbat, I want the seventh year for you to understand really who I am, that I am a God of freedom, of liberty. And I want the earth to rest. I want the ground to rest. I want you to do something different on the seventh year than you do all of the rest of the years leading up to that seventh year. And just as I gave manna and blessing for six days, you will recall with the manna, God said, I want you to go out every day, one, two, three, four, five, and gather only that which you need for one day. And if you try to keep it over, I'm going to make it to spoil, and worms are going to get in it, and you're going to be found out that you were disobedient, because I want you to trust me every day for your daily rations, your daily bread. That's why give us this day our daily bread is part of the Lord's model prayer in the gospel of Matthew and in all of our repetitious praying down through the ages. The Lord said, I want you to remember to trust me every day for your daily sustenance. And so they were to do that not only day by day, but year by year. And then on the sixth day, God said, I want you to go out, and I'm going to give you a double portion. It'll last you until it's time to go out on the first day of the week on day one. So every sixth day there was a double portion enough to do two days, the only day that that was of the week. Now, isn't that amazing? I watch all of these programs that try to explain away, just like many pastors do, all of the great miraculous events of God, as something that can be explained naturally. That's the whole nature of a miracle. It's not natural, it's supernatural, it's supranatural, it's above nature. And so there's no explanation when I have read anything that the naturalist and the evolutionist and liberal minded preachers that don't want to take God at his word will try to prove this was some natural occurrence that took place and it can be explained by the wind blowing a certain way or something happening. No, no, no. No, God said, I'm going to give you this not all the time, every day. Now think about it. If it was some natural occurrence, why would it double up one day of the week and it was the same day every day of that week? Now I'm telling you that takes a lot of trust in somebody's word rather than just taking the simple word of God as it is, as a historical narrative, and understand God is a God of miracles. And God said, I'm going to give you manna six days a week, but on the sixth day every week, I'm going to give you a double portion, and it's enough to do you on Shabbat, so you don't have to go out and gather. You can get everything ready on the sixth day, and it'll last you until the first day of the week. Well, the same thing's true. God said in the sabbatical count of years, he said, I want you to do six years. I'll give you enough the sixth year to the harvest of the eighth year. And in the eighth year you get a brand new beginning. That's why the number eight, one of the reasons it is eight, and God didn't make any mistakes here, that it is the number of new beginnings. This is exactly what happened, just like it says in Leviticus 25, verses 1 through 7. And God said, I want you to give the land rest. Now just a parenthetical thought, this is why Jeremiah said that the people went into captivity for seventy years, because they missed seventy sabbatical years. That's right. Incredible. Half of a millennium. They just lived in disobedience to God, and God said, I'm going to let the land have rest, and he did for seventy years. The people were not in the land. And so this is an incredible feat for us, but it's not for God, because remember, this is supernatural. And so you have the Shabbat every week. You have six days and then you have a seventh day of rest. It's called Shabbat. Then you have six years, and the seventh year is the sabbatical or the year of Shabbat. And so God said in verses eight through the end of the chapter, and specifically to verse seventeen, he said, Here's what I want you to do. I want you to have a whole week of sabbatical years. So he said, This is the way you count them. You go six years and then you have a sabbatical year, and that's the seventh year. You go six more years and then have a sabbatical year, that's the fourteenth year. You go six more years and then you have a sabbatical year and then you have twenty-one years, all the way through an entire week, seven sabbatical years, which is forty-nine years, and then he said, After that forty-ninth year, the next year, now the forty-ninth is a sabbatical year, but he said on the fiftieth year, twice a century, I want you to have Yovel. I want you to proclaim liberty throughout the land. You ever heard that before? Well, that's what the Lord said in Leviticus twenty-five and verse eight, and you shall count seven Sabbaths of years for yourselves, seven times seven years, that's forty-nine, and the time of the seventh Sabbath of years shall be to you forty-nine years. There it is, plain as day. And verse nine says, Then you shall cause the trumpet of the Jubilee to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month on the day of atonement. You shall make the trumpet to sound throughout all your land. And look at verse ten. Isn't this a familiar verse? And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year and listen to this and proclaim liberty throughout the land, throughout all the land to all the inhabitants. It shall be a year of jubilee for you, and each of you shall return to his possession, each of you shall return to his family. The fiftieth year shall be Yovel. It's a trumpet blast, you shall neither sow nor reap what grows on its own, nor gather the grapes of your untended vines, for it is the Jubilee. It shall be holy to you, and you shall eat its produce from the field. This is an amazing passage, and so you see that God is trying to not only give us a reminder that He is the great creator every week, and that we are to honor Him as that, but He is the one that sustains us not just through the week, but through each of the years. And so He said, The land that I use to feed you and give you produce, I want you to let it rest just like you rest, because it's all my creation. This is fascinating to me. And then he said, I want a week of those seven year cycles. And on that 49th year, that is the seventh sabbatical year, and so you need to let it rest. But I want you to proclaim Jubilee, blow the trumpet on the 50th year, and everything goes back to its original owner, to its original tribe. And that's exactly what God wanted, because he said, You're going to make bad decisions in a six-year period. And on the seventh year, then I want people to go back to their original land holdings, and I want you to forgive debt, and I want you to let everybody have a new start. But every 50th year, even among the tribal people that have sold land and it has not left the tribe, I want to go back to the original family. Because God wants everybody to have something and no one to be in debt from generation to generation, and so this is why God said, I don't want a debtor nation. I want you to be free, and I want you to be free in every way, and I want you to have something, a possession in the promised land. Now this is fascinating. Now tomorrow I'm going to get into great detail about the Torah portions during the days of Ezra and Nehemiah. And we're going to look at the mechanism that Ezra the scribe, the priestly scribe, set up to keep the people in the word of God. It's called the Torah portion, the Parsha. And then we're going to look at what happened during the days of Antiochus IV called Antiochus Epiphanes, and we're going to look at the Maccabean Revolt and what the festival and the great celebration of Hanukkah, the feast of dedication, the rededication of the temple. We're going to look at that, but we're also going to look at what brought on that great rebellion against Antiochus, because it ties into the New Testament in what is called the Haftura, the Haftor, as some call, but it is the Haftura, and it is the reading of a prophetic passage, a passage out of the prophets, that corresponds with the Torah reading, the Torah portion for a particular week and day. As we get into that, we're going to carry that over into the New Testament to Luke chapter 4, and I want you to get ready for this because these are how the scriptures are tied together, and we connect the dots by knowing these things and the history behind them and understanding that God is the God of history. And the story of the Crimson River runs deep. And it runs deep in history and the providence of God and how God works everything just right at the right time for his purposes. And that will give us great comfort to know that God is in control. He was in control during the most difficult days under Antiochus. And out of those difficult days and the mandates that were so harsh by Antiochus brought about the freedom of the Maccabees, which changed everything for a hundred years. Israel was under its own sovereign rule until the time of the Romans. And it was not until 1948 AD, less than a hundred years ago, that Israel once again, since the time of the Maccabees and the Hasmonean dynasty, that Israel was a sovereign nation once again. These things are critical to understanding not only the past and what how wonderful God is in his great providence, but the future. Because what that does for me when I see that God is going somewhere with history, it's his story. I don't have to worry about what our president or someone else is doing because I know God has it all in his hands. Yes, I'm going to try to influence everybody I can in any political sphere to do the right thing and to govern wisely. But if they don't, let me tell you, it's way above our pay grade to get on some kind of kick that we're going to uh, you know, do everything and we're going to control everything. That's in the hand of God. So you and I need to understand that God is in control and that He is sovereign and that you and I need to pray more and worry less and trust our Heavenly Father. I can't wait till tomorrow to help you to understand and go over once again the goodness of God during the intertestamental period of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. For on the way, this is Tony Crisp.

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