Tag: fulfillment of the law

From Jubilee to Kingdom: How God Transforms Ownership, Identity, and Belonging

From promised land to God’s kingdom is a journey from flesh to spirit

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I am increasingly impressed by the importance of understanding the arc and sweep of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. Though the Bible is a collection of many writings by many authors compiled over many centuries, it is a single, finely woven tapestry rich and brilliant in its nuance and theme.

Of course, a tapestry makes no sense if we do not view it from the right perspective. From the back side of the tapestry it appears like a jumbled mess of tangled threads.

The full beauty and design of the tapestry remains a mystery until it is viewed from the right perspective. Only then can we understand and appreciate it.

We would have no sense of the beauty or theme of the tapestry if we only saw it from the back side. Because the tapestry of thole Bible is so grand, we can also miss the big picture if we study it only as through a microscope or a magnifying glass.

We need to step back often and consider the trajectory, arc, and sweep of Scripture – from beginning to end – to make sense of the individual threads that may not appear to make sense in isolation.

From the time of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob onward, the Bible seems to be all about these patriarchs and their descendants to whom God promised a land. For over 400 years Abraham’s descendants looked forward to taking possession of this land. That time was spent in captivity in Egypt, where the prospects of God’s promise grew dim and seemed unlikely until God sent Moses.

Led by Joshua, the people finally enter into the land after another 40 years of wandering in the wilderness with Moses. They drive out the inhabitants, settle in, and live there almost a millennia through cycles of judges and kings. It seems all about this land and its people. The theme of God’s covenant to give his people the promised land and the people’s covenant to keep God’s law dominates the portion of Scripture we call the Old Testament.

The land, the great leaders, the Law seem to define their destination. Again and again, however, those things prove to be provisional. The leaders fail. The Law fails because they seem wholly incapable of keeping it. The very land, itself, seems to fail them.

When we step back, we see that these things that seem to be the main point of the whole story actually point beyond themselves. They expose something deeper. They give way to something infinitely greater.

One of those themes that gets buried and lost in the jumble of threads is Jubilee. The Jubilee instructions are embedded in the middle of the Law in Leviticus 25. They are God’s specific instructions on how Israel was to live in the land into which God was leading them. That they never actually carried out the Jubilee instructions may account for us failing to  recognize their importance in the tapestry of God’s Word.

The Radical Vision of Jubilee

In Leviticus 25, God established the Year of Jubilee—a societal reset unlike anything in the ancient world. The Year of Jubilee was to be observed after seven periods of seven years. In the 50th year, the Year of Jubilee, the land was to be returned to its original owners. Debts were to be released. Indentured servants were to be set free.

The Year of Jubilee was to be observed every 50 years. Every fifty years was to be a reset.These were God’s instructions and the reason for these instructions was clearly laid out:

“The land is mine” sayeth the LORD, “and you are strangers and sojourners in it.“

(Leviticus 25:23)

Let that sink in….. God never intended Israel to own the land.

Even today many people consider Israel to be the land God promised his people for eternity. Even today we think it is all about the land.

Jubilee appears to us to be an economic policy. A cringeworthy redistribution of wealth that might offend modern, conservative sensibilities. But underneath it lies a theological theme – God’s design – that reshapes everything when we see it:

God wanted them to live in the land, to work the land, to benefit from the land, but only and always as temporary dwellers – as foreigners. They were not to call the land home. They were never meant to treat the land as their own – as owners.

The write of Hebrews understood this, and commended Abraham for living in the land of promise “as in a foreign land, living in tents.” (Hebrews 11:9)

We can understand why, the writer of Hebrews commended the people of faith who “acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.” (Heb. 11:13) They were “seeking a homeland … a better country … a heavenly one.” (Hebrews 11:15-16) Why? Because they understood the promised land wasn’t their final destination!

Jubilee is not about fairness, or economics, or socialism—it is about something much more transcendent. It is about God’s eternal plan for the heavens and the earth and all the people in it. It is a reminder to Israel (and us) of who they (we) are in relation to God. It is a reminder that to them (and to us) this world is not all there is. God has bigger plans!

A People Shaped by identity

Though God promised His covenant people a land, their identity as God’s people was the most important thing. God’s vision for them extends beyond land into identity as His people. The Israelites were not meant to identify with the land, but with God.

They were to identity as God’s people living temporarily in a land God gave them, and they were to be a light to the nations. From the days of Abraham, God planned “to bless all the nations” through his descendants. (Gen. 12:3; 18:18; 22:18; 26:4; & 28:14) They were to be a people God called out from among the nations to covenant with Him. These people were intended to identify with God’s greater purpose in the world – which was for all the nations.

Israel is commanded to care for the stranger, the poor, and the landless in the land of God’s promise—not merely as an act of generosity, but as an expression of memory and identity:

“You were strangers in Egypt.”

God wanted them to remember who (and whose) they were. God rescued and redeemed them for Himself and for His purposes. Their story was always meant to shape their community and society into what God wanted them to be. God wanted to establish His people in His land to carry out His eternal plans for all the nations – for all people in the world.

They were not to be a people defined by power, dominance or possession, but by dependence, deliverance, provision, and protection of others – just as God delivered them, provided for them, and protected them. God’s instructions were structured to prevent them from becoming the kind of nation under which they once suffered – a nation like all the other nations around them. They were to be different, holy, and set apart for God’s greater purpose

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What Does God Want from Us?

This question gets at the whole point of Scripture….

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If God is the creator of the universe, of everything seen and unseen, as the Bible says, if God was intentional in His creation and made us in His image as the centerpiece of His creation, what was His intention for us? What does He want from us?

This question gets at the whole point of Scripture, but I think we miss the point among all the words sometimes.

Even people who believe that God exists and acknowledge God made us get lost in the words sometimes. We see in Scripture lists of “do’s and don’ts” and rules and warnings, and we fail to see the big picture, the purpose of God. We fail to see God’s character and heart.

The Law was intended by God to show us what is right and, more importantly, to reveal to us that we are incapable of doing what is right in and of ourselves. (Rom. 7:7-25) We all fall short (Rom. 3:23), and we fail to do what we know we ought to do. (Rom. 7:18-19)

Anyone who depends on doing right to make themselves right with God are cursed (Gal. 3:10). If they fail at one point, they fail at everything. If a person refrains from killing anyone his entire life except for one time, he is still a murderer – not because of all the people he didn’t kill, but because of the one person he did kill. If a person lies only once, he is a liar.

If you sin once, you are sinner. “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1:8)

The point of the law is to help us understand that we can’t achieve righteousness by our own efforts. It’s impossible for us. We must depend on God for it. The Law was given alongside the promise of God to show people their sins to that we would receive the grace that God offers us through Jesus. (Gal. 3:19)

Salvation (from sin and death) is a gift God gives us by His grace; God gives us salvation by grace so that none of us can boast about having earned it. (Eph. 2:8-9)

But is this all God expects from us? Is this all God wants from us – to be saved from sin and death? If salvation from sin and death was all God wanted for us, He could have made us without the capability of sinning, and He could have made us eternal from the beginning.

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Who Was Jesus?

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Who was Jesus? A friend recently asked, “Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism. Right?” He explained his thought that the people who came after Jesus created a new religion using him as the central figure in spite of who he really was – just a Jewish man preaching Judaism.

This is a popular Internet characterization of Christianity. I am not a scholar on the subject, but I did minor in religion in college. I took all the courses for a religion major, including the thesis course, and I even did the research and wrote the thesis. I would have had a religion major if I had turned in my thesis. I didn’t do it because I didn’t need the major. I took the classes because I was interested in them. I didn’t hand in the thesis paper because I didn’t feel good about it.

A religion major at a small liberal arts school meant majoring in “religion” generally. There were no flavors available for particular study. We looked at all religions, though we focused most heavily on Judaism and Christianity. That is because there was one “Christian” professor and one “Jewish” professor.

The Christian professor took the position that “all roads lead to the top of the same mountain”. Of the Christian road, he was very fond of Liberation Theology that took the position that the God has been changing, progressing and more or less learning to be God throughout time. Liberation Theology was born in South America among the people who were oppressed by the corrupt government and military forces in the 1970’s, and the Catholic priests who espoused this theology believed in taking arms in counter-insurgence against the oppressive political and military regimes.

My “Christian” experience included some very progressive literature. We were encouraged to sit in on lectures given by people like Hare Krishnas and a European Muslim – both lectures that I attended, among others. The Jewish professor was very much the modern, reformed variety – not conservative or Hasidic. This was my introduction to religion and to the Bible.

I did read the Bible from cover to cover in college, not only as an academic exercise as part of my course of study, but because I was drawn to it. In the midst of the all-roads-lead-to-the-same-mountaintop atmosphere in which I studied, I began to be taken by Jesus, who said, “I am the way, and the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by me.” (John 14:6) This is because Jesus stood head and shoulders above all the other religious personalities that I read about. There was something transcendentally different about him.

As I have been thinking about the (largely rhetorical) question my friend posed about Jesus, I think of the sweep of the Bible – Old Testament to New Testament, beginning to end. Having been intimate with it for well over 30 years, having read it many times over, and recounting my own journey of discovery, I feel compelled to tackle the question, but the scope of the answer is daunting.

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