The Sabbath and Jubilee Years are perhaps the most important
restrictions on the nation. These two
practices truly will separate the people of God from the rest of their
neighbors, will truly mark them out as different and will truly show the world
what sort of God they have, one who is faithful, willing and able to provide
for His people. These practices will
reveal a people who not only have such a God but who are willing to trust Him
completely no matter what He asks them to do.
He wants them to test Him in these things and yet we have no record of
the Jubilee being practiced and in Jeremiah we see that they are being exiled
in part for their failure to keep at least seventy Sabbath years. In other words it had been nearly 500 years
since they had practiced what God commanded.
Are we guilty of failing to trust Him and seeking after things other
than His kingdom in our own lives by failing to practice Sabbath?
The impetus for telling this parable was when a man in the
crowd asked Jesus, as a rabbi, to speak with the man’s brother and tell him to
divide his inheritance with him. He
wanted more than he had received and Jesus says the problem isn’t your brother,
it is you, your mind is set on the wrong thing.
You want more of what this earth has to offer you and if you don’t get
over that you will miss what is truly important. What did the man who had the amazing harvest
do wrong? He set his contentment by that
harvest. The Lord had blessed him but he
hadn’t offered either thanksgiving or the harvest itself to the Lord, he
decided to trust in what he had. Our
contentment is always to be in Him. It
always goes back to seeking the kingdom rather than anything else, it is a
problem of desire.
Do we want gifts we think are good or do we want what God
thinks is good? We can’t know how to
properly order our desires so long as we control the definition of good. It is the last thing we have to get rid of in
our lives, the desire to determine, apart from God, what is good. We couldn’t live at that level of trust in
the beginning and millennia after the fall we cannot rid ourselves of that
notion. In classical philosophy, the
search was for the good. Even in the
last century, Iris Murdoch wrote a little book on the Sovereignty of Good. We are relentless in our search to define the
good and have it and yet, as Christians, we know that good is the province only
of the one who created all things. If we
would find rest for our souls, we would practice Sabbath in order to allow Him
to reveal what is truly good.
The God of Abraham praise,
who reigns enthroned above;
Ancient of everlasting days,
and God of love;
Jehovah, great I AM,
by earth and heaven confessed:
I bow and bless the sacred Name
for ever blessed.
who reigns enthroned above;
Ancient of everlasting days,
and God of love;
Jehovah, great I AM,
by earth and heaven confessed:
I bow and bless the sacred Name
for ever blessed.
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