Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why God Blesses You | Torah | Leviticus 25

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Does God want you to live a comfortable life? Should you strive for an easy life? Should you spend all your resources on yourself? In today's episode, Keith shares what we can learn from the year of Jubilee in Leviticus 25. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Leviticus 25

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. Imagine you received a letter in the mail telling you that all your debt was forgiven. Your school loans paid off. Your mortgage, gone. Your credit card bills abolished. As crazy as it sounds, something like this happened every 50 years in ancient Israel. It was called the Jubilee, and the Jubilee was a day of liberation. Deats were forgiven and indentured servants released.

mortgage property returned. And on this same day, everyone's sins were forgiven. Even spiritual debt was paid off. Our word jubilation comes from the jubilee. And you can see why. If you were poor or in debt or enslaved or oppressed, the day of jubilee would lead to jubilation. In Leviticus 25, the Lord gave Moses instructions for the Israelites to observe two very important years, the Sabbath year and the jubilee. Those both follow from the fourth command. that instructed the Israelites to rest every seventh day and to dedicate that day to the Lord. The day of rest was called the Sabbath. In the same way, every seventh year, they were to give the land a year of rest.

And after seven of those, after 49 years, they had a Jubilee. The Jubilee was a proclamation of liberty to the Israelites who had been enslaved because of debt. And it was a restoration of land to families who had sold it out of financial need during the previous 50 years. Here's Leviticus 25, verse 10. Consecrate the 50th year and proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you. Each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. So in the year of Jubilee, debts canceled, prisoners freed, land returned to the family. Here's Deuteronomy 15, verse 2. This is how it's to be done. Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require a payment from anyone among their

own people because the Lord's time for canceling debts has been proclaimed. The Jubilee demonstrates a commitment to social justice and caring for the economically vulnerable. Jubilee was good news to the poor and to those enslaved by financial debt. The Jubilee in Leviticus 25 is unique. Nowhere else in the world can you find anything similar. Why did God command them to do this? Well, the book of Leviticus is teaching them how to live in the promised land under God's reign. And the place to start was to remember that the promised land belonged to God, not them. God was the landlord and Israel was the tenant. They were to live in dependence upon God, and they were to have a deep care and concern for all of God's people. Here's Leviticus 2535.

If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves, help them as you would have a foreigner and a stranger so they can continue to live among you. The Israelites were instructed to care for the person without the resources to care for themselves. And then a couple verses later, you find the motivation. In verse 38, it says, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God. See, this takes us all the way back to Egypt and the Exodus in which the Israelites were freed

from slavery. God's saying to them, look, I've shown you murder. mercy, so show other people mercy. I've blessed you, so you should be a blessing to other people. God had delivered them from oppression and slavery in Egypt and blessed them, so now they, the Israelites, should be the most generous people around. So here's a question I ask myself. Has God blessed me so that I can have an easier, more comfortable life? I mean, to ask the question is to answer the question. God provides all that we have. Remember, we are not owner. We are like the Israelites.

We are people who have been given blessings by God. So he has given us all that we have, not so that we can spend more and more on ourselves to make our life a little bit better, a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more convenient. No, he has blessed us so that we can be a blessing to others. He's been generous to us so that we can be generous to others. God has been gracious to us so that we can be gracious to others.

Jesus talks about the Jubilee in Luke chapter 4. He's at the synagogue. So let me just set the scene. They ask Jesus to read from the scriptures, and he chooses the passage that he's going to read to them. Everyone is sitting around the walls in a circle. And Jesus reads this passage. It says this in Luke 416 to 21. He was in Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And on the Sabbath day, he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. So in other words, it was part of Jesus's regular habit to be in worship with his community. I guess Jesus didn't have kids that liked to play sports or he didn't like to stay out late at night or travel or all the things that keep us from regularly worshiping in our churches. But anyway, back to the story. Jesus stood up to read and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written. The spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind to set the oppressed free

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Jesus is declaring that he is the Jubilee. He is the year of the Lord's favor. All that was written in the book of Leviticus, Concerning the Jubilee? Well, it was all pointing to Jesus. See, Jesus has come to declare good news to those who are spiritually poor. He has come to release those enslaved to sin. He's come to give sight to the spiritually blind. He's come to bring justice for the oppressed. Jesus is our Jubilee. He has freed us from slavery. So then how should we live?

Well, the way God has always called his people to live. To be generous with all that he's blessed us with, with our time, our talent, our treasure, to be generous to meet the needs of those around us. God has been merciful to us, so we should be merciful to others. He is our Jubilee. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk Newslet. You'll get a short email once a week.

It'll challenge you to grow in your faith, give you interesting background on today's passage, and a lot, lot more. Just click the link in the show notes to sign up. It'll help you deepen your journey with Jesus.